 That title is not clickbait. I hate The Giver for a variety of reasons. Yeah, it's a classic and many people have fond memories of reading it as a kid and they all agree that the movie was a bad adaptation and yada yada. I don't care. It sucks. And frankly, listening to everyone else in the world talk about it as if it's a masterpiece feels like gaslighting. The Giver is awful, horrendous, substandard, deficient, poor, inadequate, terrible, and dreadful. It's a pretentious pile of garbage that fails as a story, as entertainment, and at sending a message. It was tailor-made to give to board school children so that teachers could lecture them on how deep and meaningful it is, yet it fails to even do that. If I were a worse video essayist, I would spend the next 15 minutes going over the entire life of the book's author, Lois Lowry, and what inspired her to write it in the first place, as well as some niche philosophical concept that won't make sense until the end of the video. But I like getting to the point, so I'll do that. The Giver is a dystopian novel that follows a boy named Jonas who lives in a community where there is no pain and everyone is the same except for a few small differences in personality. The people of the community, which doesn't get a name because confusion, are all assigned a job that best fits them. When his turn to get chosen for a job comes up, Jonas is passed over. Later, the elders of his community tell him he is to become the next receiver of memory. The receiver is the only person who is allowed to seek out knowledge beyond what people are taught and they hold memories from the time before this community was created. They're the only people that understand things like pain and so they function as advisors for the elders. Due to his training, Jonas becomes more isolated from his friends and family. He also becomes disillusioned by the community and its rules both because he now understands how the world used to work and because he sees the darker side of his community. Eventually, he learns that an infant named Gabriel was set to be killed for not fitting into the strict confines set out for him and realizes he needs to take action. With the help of the receiver, Jonas takes Gabriel into the night and runs off. Him leaving means all his memories will be absorbed by the community and everyone will have the knowledge he does. The receiver stays behind to help the people deal with all of it since getting all that knowledge and pain at once will be very difficult. They leave the community and wind up in the middle of a snowstorm. The book ends with Jonas crawling towards a possible human habitation. His ultimate fate is left ambiguous. If that sounds boring and stupid, you don't need to watch the rest of the video. Go be productive and secure in the knowledge that you didn't waste your time on this. If not, if you insist that the giver isn't as bad as I'm making it out to be, let's point out everything wrong with it from beginning to end. The start of the book has Jonas getting his new job with everyone else. When he's skipped over, he's very nervous and then he gets told that he gets to have the coolest, most specialist job in the whole community. Then he gets to be privy to all this secret information that makes him smarter and better than everyone else. For a supposed dystopia, this is a weirdly positive plot point. The start of this is a lot like the start of Ranger's Apprentice, but worse in every way. It doesn't add much to Jonas' character or display what makes him different from everybody else. As far as we know, he's a completely normal kid at this stage, and he only begins acting differently after his training starts. His behavior changes seem to be due to experiencing new memories and learning more about his society, not anything inherent to his personality or growing up. What about Jonas makes him special enough to be the receiver of memory? I don't know. Will was naturally skilled in sneaking and climbing, which made him a great pick to be a Ranger. Haltz even arranged a secret test to make sure he had the necessary talent. He tricked him into breaking into a tower without getting caught, and he would have succeeded if Haltz hadn't already known that he was coming. After that, his training is grueling and takes up most of the remainder of the series. Jonas' training isn't even training, it's just him staying still and relieving other people's experiences. There's no effort on his part. There's some anguish and suffering, sure, just no real effort. Why should I care about him gaining all this new knowledge and experience if he didn't work for it? There's nothing inherent to him that allowed him to do this, and he didn't have to work for any of it, so why is Jonas the protagonist at all? That's a question I find myself asking a lot. The protagonist is ideally the character who drives the plot more than anyone else, and they ideally do it by being unique or special in some way. It might be some special powers they have, or their intelligence, or even their determination to do the right thing that makes them continue after others have given up. It could be a million different things, and yet many protagonists, including Jonas, have nothing that sets them apart from anyone else. They're just the hero because the author declares them to be the hero. The story just happens around them, and we're supposed to be impressed. Jonas's only distinguishing trait is that he has light blue eyes. That's how the receiver is chosen. They find people with different colored eyes. It's one thing for the community to be that shallow when it comes to making important decisions. It's another to give the fucking main character no other distinguishing features. They even say at one point that Jonas's friend Fiona has red hair and that frustrates scientists because they want to get rid of it, but can't. So some physical differences are good and others are bad? What kind of sense does that make? None. Jonas passively receives all the memories. Then he just learns about all the terrible parts of his society. He doesn't really do anything until the end. And even then, he gets to save the day and change his entire society just by running off and saving his friend, if you can consider an infant your friend. That's a selfish goal, if a completely understandable one, and it should only help the two of them. Yet because the technology used to transfer memories is unexplained and makes no fucking sense, he also gets to enact change on a grand scale. There's no effort on his part to make the community better, it just happens incidentally. There's a subplot about how Jonas is getting old enough to be horny now and has to take pills to suppress his sexual urges. Everyone in the community does because... This subplot isn't that weird or dumb, all things considered, I just need to mention that it starts off with Jonas having a sex dream about his friend Fiona, in the dream he tries to get her into a bathtub so he can wash her. That's it. When he tells his parents about this, that's when he starts taking the pills. But in this community, the kids bathe their elders all the time. It's not at all sexual to them, so how does his hormone-addled mind go to washing Fiona's back as a sex dream? There are real world cultures where nudity is not inherently sexual, and the community appears to be one of them, so this is a strange detail. When I first read this, it took me a while to even realize that Jonas was having sexual urges because bathing others is a completely normal thing to them. A better way of showing off his urges would be to have him fantasizing about kissing Fiona. It's still G-rated while being more consistent. Beyond that, there isn't a lot to many of the characters or the story itself. That's not inherently bad, this is a dystopia, and those are more about the setting than anything else. So story and characters that are paper thin are fine sometimes. The giver could still be a good book if it had an interesting take on society or the human condition, however, you know this video wouldn't exist if that were the case. And that brings me to the message of the story. Some of you might be saying, James, it's about individuality and the meaning of what it is to be human. It's deep and mean stuff. To you I say, shut the fuck up you middle school English teacher wannabe. The whole point of this story is that enforced sameness is bad, which is the same message that Ayn Rand sent an anthem almost 60 years earlier, but it does a much worse job sending that message. Almost everyone is happy and cared for in this world. There's no hunger or pain at all. Everyone has a loving family, they're all given a job that they're happy with and excel at, and none of them know about the world before, so they don't miss anything. There aren't even any natural disasters or crimes to worry about. On the surface it sounds great, because on the surface it is great. They've eliminated most of the problems modern society has to deal with. Awesome. Obviously this is deliberate. This world seems like a nice place to live at first before the curtain gets slowly pulled back to reveal that it's awful actually. The problem with this is that the world isn't nearly as awful as it's made out to be. If you asked people who live in obscure poverty and more if they'd give up individuality in exchange for survival, many of them would say yes. A starving child in a slum whose family has all died and this year's civil war would love to live in Jonas' community. Anthem gets around this problem by showing how enforcing such strict roles on everyone saps their will to live and makes society stagnant. Everyone is forced to retire at the age of 40 and then they just sit around without any hobbies until they keel over. Technology has also regressed until the most advanced thing they have access to is candles. Then the main character comes along, sees that this is wrong, and tries to change things. First he invents a battery and tries to get his leaders to use it but they fear change too much and refuse to do so. Then he realizes one person can't bring change to a society this resistant to it so he takes his girlfriend and runs off to start a new life in the wilderness. It's similar to The Giver but there's no instant world saving. It's made clear that any changes that may come will take time and that the individualistic people just need to look out for themselves and their families while they wait for their old society to collapse on its own. It's a bit silly but it gets the point across, which is why it's Rand's one decent book. The Giver just ignores this and expects us to side against this world by default. It's a weirdly privileged position to take when you think about it for more than a fucking microsecond. It's a well-off American telling people that having a stable food source, medical care, and comfortable living space is pointless and just a thin veneer placed over how awful things actually are. The book tries to show a dark side to things by revealing how those who don't fit in are killed and that's obviously terrible. That said, it doesn't make much sense. They kill infants for being identical twins because they can't have two people being the same, even though everyone is supposed to be the same in this world. What is considered sameness here? Would they be allowed to live if one of them had a birthmark and the other didn't? This is referred to as releasing people and they do it to a lot of others, such as the elderly who are too old to work anymore. They also kill a pilot who went off course while flying. Does that mean everyone never makes a single mistake in this world? Does everyone instantly know how to perform complex feats like flying on their first try or is everyone who doesn't get a right the first time killed? And then we learn that people can volunteer to be released. In other words, assisted suicide is legal here. Uh, okay. It's not that suicide is a good thing, just that it's quite a bit different than being executed by the state for not fitting into narrow confines of what is considered socially acceptable. Rosemary committing suicide is treated with as much horror as the revelation that Jonas's father euthanizes infants, and they're both bad, but they're very different things. In the end, the twist that those who are released are really killed is just a cheap tactic the author threw out there to tug on our heartstrings and reassure us that this world is bad. I'd call it a straw man, but this community doesn't exist, so that term seems odd. It's not that I think this society would be a great place to live. I don't. It's that the book does a piss-poor job of showing what a horrible dystopia this place is and accidentally makes the positives outweigh the negatives. At the end, Jonas escapes, I think, it's ambiguous, which allows them to lead into the sequels that I refuse to read. I'm sure they're all just as poorly thought out, though. One other odd thing to mention is that no one can see color except for the receiver and their apprentice. They were genetically engineered to be colorblind to maintain sameness. They don't want people to see each other as different. So no one can see color because it might distinguish them, but they still have different faces, heights, and hair, so they're already distinguished. That's why black and white movies were a thing and everyone didn't look the exact same. The movie is even worse in this regard. Since it's visual, we can see that everything is in black and white. It doesn't function as a twist or any sort of revelation about the nature of this world. We just see everything in black and white, and then Jonas, and the audience by proxy, starts seeing color. Then he sees more. This is my segue into complaining about the film. Somehow the film takes this terrible book and makes it into an equally terrible yet vacuous adaptation. Big Joel made a video on this a few months ago, and while I think it's a good video, it's predicated on the idea that the book is good and the movie is bad primarily because it doesn't follow the book, so I need to talk about it still. And I'll do that by going down a list, because fuck it. The fact that this is rated PG-13 is either a sign of how the MPAA has turned into a society of pussies, or a sign of how desperately the filmmakers wanted to be seen as adult. Problem is that these days PG-13 just means PG. Show a drop of blood? That's only for 17 and up, bucko. There's no violence or sexual content in the film at all. The most child-unfriendly bit is when they mention all the baby killing. That's a very quiet process, though. No violence or anything. It's solidly PG. Deal with it. The opening narration just straight up says that the world ended and then everyone decided to embrace these communities. In the book, it's left ambiguous how things got to this point, since that's not important. All that matters is how things are now, similar to how the Revolution in 1984 is left as a big background detail. Of course, if it came out today, Disney would buy the rights and make eight exclusive streaming shows covering the events of the Revolution and the life of Winston's third cousin because every aspect of the lore needs its own money-making entry in the franchise. This is just a way in which the giver tried to market itself as an adventure rather than a calmer, more subdued story. The book had no action scenes save the climax, sort of, no romance subplot, and no simplified good versus evil morality. But this came out in 2014 when everyone was trying to be the fucking hunger games. Everyone wanted to show an evil future government get overthrown through the power of love triangles, even though the Hunger Games was more intelligent than that. That was the only type of movie allowed for several years until several big flops, like this one, meant the genre sank. I swear to every god that series is pretty good, but its shadow will cover all of pop culture until I've become worm shit. This is especially annoying because there were 45 trillion crappy books in that genre they could have adapted that would have fit into this mold quite a bit better. Hell, it might have even made better movies. Instead, they went for the small amount of name recognition this IP offered. And the chase scene at the end makes me want to commit multiple violent crimes. This kid on foot and on a bike outruns a hovercraft? How slow is that thing? Jonas is older in the movie. Rather than being 12, he's in his mid to late teens and played by an actor in his 20s. This sort of change is common since minors have restrictions on how much they can work, so it's easier to use adult actors. Some changes in an adaptation are fine. Quit bitching because it doesn't line up 100% and start bitching about problems that matter. Being older makes Jonas seem less vulnerable though. That's all. I don't have anything else to add on the topic. I suppose it is less weird that an old man would grab a teenager by the arms rather than rubbing his hands all over the back of a prepubescent boy. That's one change we should all get behind. The movie is still a blatant cash grab with no thought put into it though. I expect this kind of shit from Jeff Bridges. Meryl Streep deserved better. Okay, maybe she didn't. In the book, the villain was Society. The machine that Jonas lived in and the many cogs that kept it going. There was no one person that he could pin all these problems and flaws on. In the film, the high elder is the villain. Everything is pinned on her. It's all her fault. She personally orders many of the awful actions people undertake. She sends that sci-fi hovercraft after Jonas in the climax. He can't struggle in the wilderness against the elements in a desperate attempt to find civilization. That's too boring. He needs to run away from government agents while the evil leader looks on, evil-y. But his friend is also piloting the ship and lets him go so he was never in any real danger. If Streep had chosen literally any other pilot, he would have been captured and killed. Dumbass. This is a product not just of wanting Meryl Streep to have more screen time, but this idea of societal problems being blamed on individuals that Americans so love. Many people genuinely think that everything from economic troubles to drug abuse epidemics to their children having political disagreements with them can be blamed on a single person or small group. Why does this community kill off those it deems as imperfect? Because the people in charge tell them to. Why did I lose my job? Clearly it's because the Jews are trying to keep me down. Why are more kids identifying as LGBT? It's because their teachers are brainwashing them because obviously everyone is straight by default. How do we solve all these problems? By putting a single person in charge and giving them all the authority they need to get rid of everyone who is doing the bad things. After that we will have no more problems and we will never need to find a new target to attack, nor will I have to worry about finding myself in the crosshairs one day. This obviously isn't exclusive to Americans, it's just common here, and it misses the point of all decent dystopias. The issue here was not the leaders of this society, that's why they barely feature in the book. The issue was the system that had been created. Many people were fine with sameness, either because they'd never considered an alternative or because they felt it was the best way to live. They grew up living here and it worked out okay for them, therefore it's good. They aren't evil people, they're just cold and disconnected. Sameness is made up of thousands of individual parts all performing their assigned tasks. If one of those parts stops, the others will continue. There is no single lever that can operate things and no one part to blame for the crimes of society. Things like 1984 or even the Hunger Games have must-ash twirling villains while still acknowledging that they're not the problem, they're just the representation of the problem. Big Brother may not even exist, he might just be a propaganda tool for the party to keep control. Changing the world requires more than getting rid of one person, and rant. I admit I liked Jeff Bridges' performance here. You can tell that he's a tired man who wants to do good and help the people around him, but he also knows he's near the end of his life. On top of that, he has the memories of so many other people and so many horrible experiences that he feels a hundred years older than he is. He seems to almost be looking forward to dying, like he can't wait for the burden to be lifted at last, yet he knows the burden isn't disappearing, it's just being transferred to someone else, someone who did nothing wrong, and he feels guilty about this. That's not even counting how he already got his daughter killed because she couldn't handle it. I also like the tension between him and Streep, where she views him as a threat to her power, but she still needs him around to help with governing. It's only when he becomes a threat to the system itself that she's able to act against him. This is the sort of thing Jonas wouldn't have been privy to in the book, and so the film taking time to focus on other characters works to its advantage here. This makes him a deeper character than simply being a wise old mentor with a tragic past, an archetype I've seen a lot before. But that's about the only positive thing I have to say. At the very least of the book attempted to say something. The film took that and turned it into a shitty action-adventure story with very little action or adventure. Some might say that makes it better, since the book did such a bad job at sending its message. I say it's worse, since it's not even fucking trying. There was an opportunity to improve upon the messaging and make this story into something worth watching. Maybe iron out the details in the setting, make Jonas a more interesting character who has real reason to be chosen, and follow the general themes from the book. It wouldn't be great, but it would be a perfectly acceptable pile of blandness that everyone forgot about an hour after they left the theaters. So that's it. The giver sucks and I hate you. Goodbye. Yes, I was forced to read this book for school. How could you tell? Huge thank you to everyone who watched this far. I'm sure everyone who's leaving a comment telling me to kill myself definitely made sure to watch the whole video. So thanks to them as well. 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