Avis des critiques

In a sense, The Giver is too smart to be a Young Adult adaptation. In another sense, alas, it's too dumb to be a good one. The film gets increasingly clunky as Jonas becomes acquainted with the past, which society has erased from memory (that's another nod, whether conscious or not, to real life: we live in a technology-driven age where the past is often viewed as irrelevant).

This might be an anti-pharmaceutical, anti-cult (Katie Holmes aptly drones along as Jonas's mom), anti-plot, anti-suspense allegory. It could also just be Thanksgiving at your robot-zombie in-laws.

Despite a truly pained performance from Jeff Bridges and a beautifully imagined, three-dimensional futuristic world, "The Giver," in wanting to connect itself to more recent YA franchises, sacrifices subtlety, inference and power.

Philip Noyce's film adaptation of The Giver, Lois Lowry's middle-school war horse of a classic, at first presents a genuinely sad portrait of an oppressive, joyless future. But its ultimate vision of humanity itself — of all the things that this world is missing — is a crushingly generic one. Add to that some painfully lifeless action, and you wind up with a movie that plays like a low-rent Logan's Run crossed with a UNICEF commercial.

...You may find yourself wondering what fresh movie hell this is. In truth, the enervating hash of dystopian dread, vague religiosity and commercial advertising-style uplift is nothing if not stale. Adapted from Lois Lowry's book for young readers, the story involves an isolated society that, with its cubistic dwellings, mindless smiles, monochromatic environs and nebulous communitarianism, seem modeled on a Scandinavian country or an old Mentos commercial.

What makes The Giver as a text so powerful is the reader's simpatico journey with Jonas in realizing the banalities and horrors of his community; when he wavers, and rues his loss of normalcy, the reader sympathizes with his self-preserving instincts. In Noyce's film, however, sterility and evil are sterility and evil from the very beginning, and the internal crisis of its protagonist amounts to the flicking of an on/off switch rather than the ebb and flow of a consciousness being born.

This year at the movies has given us two superior dystopia tales — "The Lego Movie" and "Snowpiercer" — rich in the kind of real emotion "The Giver" talks about a lot but never achieves. Instead, the more vibrant experience supposedly flows into the movie, the more canned everything seems.