The amount of superhero films produced these days is only rivaled by the amount of young adult dystopian movies. This year we’ve had The Maze Runner, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, and Divergent, and there looks to be no shortage of them in 2015. While the novels these productions were based on were released in the late 2000s there were plenty of examples before the turn of the century that these works have taken inspiration, including Lois Lowry’s The Giver. When I heard of a film adaptation this year, I was intrigued, but the more I saw it, the more I wanted to spend my money to go see Guardians of the Galaxy again instead. It didn’t look different from the other dystopian films released this year and I just had no interest to see it. It didn’t seem to have the heart that the original had. But was I wrong not to give The Giver a chance?

The plot follows the book relatively close. After a war, the community has rid themselves of different races and feelings to achieve total equality, so much that the perspective of everyone is visually in black and white. 16 year old Jonas is selected to be the Receiver of Memories, a position in which he gets the memories of various people before the formation of the community by the Giver. Jonas starts understanding how the world originally was compared to what it is now and develops various emotions and a sense of color that he wants to share with everyone, but is not allowed to by the Chief Elder. After kearning what death is and its presence in his world, he decides to journey into the border to spread the memories with everyone in the community.

For those who read the book, you might identify a few changes such as aging the main character and giving him a love interest. Since Jonas was 12 in the novel and his reactions might be more understandable, I don’t think it completely destroys the movie and it’s interesting to see someone else receive Jonas’ memories.

But this is not a compete benefit to the film because of one gaping flaw that ruins the whole experience: The Giver never slows down. The direction, the narration, the dialogue, everything just moves too quickly, making the movie only an hour and a half long, which is shorter than the average of all the animated films aimed for children this year. Any time Jonas realizes or experiences something, the audience is never given a chance to take it in. Minor characters, including Jonas’ friend and love interest, do not have the impact they had in the book because they aren’t fully developed. Each scene felt like it was under two minutes and viewers didn’t have enough time to understand the characters.

The actors are all right but nothing special. Being that it’s a movie where it’s important to look uncomfortable or display no emotion, there’s not really that much to highlight. Brenton Thwaites does an all right job as Jonas while Jeff Bridges doesn’t seem to know what sort of tone he wants to give his character. Oscar nominee Meryl Streep has been reduced to whispering exposition and acting like a female version of President Snow. The security and technology also seem similar to the Hunger Games, but thankfully the similarities don’t dominate the whole movie like I thought it would.

While The Giver is pretty faithful to the novel, it just doesn’t convey the message that it’s trying to give. The pacing is too fast which leads to undeveloped characters, choppy editing, and never giving the audience a chance to absorb what’s happening to care enough about the main character. The acting is mostly mediocre while the visuals range from slightly interesting to generic dystopian society. It made me question if I actually like the novel now that I’m older, which is not good if the adaptation also isn’t good. Whether you read the original or not, liked it or not, I can’t guarantee you’re going to enjoy this movie. I won’t be having good memories of it.

-Brady Lass