Like most public-schooled American children, reading The Giver was a rite of passage for me. Long before I read adult classics like Brave New World, Anthem, and 1984, The Giver let me explore what it would be like to live in a world without individuality or history, where people suppressed happiness and despair alike in the name of keeping the human race going. Aimed at a moderately young audience, it’s going to inevitably be compared to fellow post-apocalyptic young adult films like The Hunger Games and Divergent, and Jeff Bridges — who plays the titular Giver and has been working for 20 years to get the film made — admits that the success of those franchises helped his project along.



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