The Giver and Color

And today I found out that this is the first book in a series. Now I have more books on my to-read list.

UPDATE: The Giver will be shot in both color and black and white according to this article.

Now I know making a movie adaptation of a book is a hard thing to do. Hell, I would never want to be in charge of one. People would want it to be true to the book and others wouldn't mind the adaptation changing things. And people will hate you for the adaptation no matter what.

But one thing you can't change in a movie adaptation is the heart and soul of the book/source material. So making a story modern day (Elementary and Hannibal) is okay but if you change important parts of the source material (DOOM and Nickelodeon's Animorphs tv show) then not so good.

Movie adaptations sometimes feel as if they were written by people who had no clue about what made the books so enjoyable. So when I see a trailer I try to give the movie the benefit of the doubt and other times the trailer makes me so mad I just rage while thinking about it.

The Giver's trailer is in color. Now I haven't read the book since fifth or sixth grade so I don't remember what happens all that well and I'm using Wikipedia as a basic guide to what happened. But the thing I remember is that the book is in black and white. This is part of the symbolism of the book.

The Giver is a dystopian novel. I am a big fan of this sub-genre since it tends to show what people value at any given time. They are fears of a given time kept for all eternity in story form.

The Giver's big thing is sameness. That everything is the same to keep the peace and even color has been taken out of people's lives. This isn't the first time that pain being removed to keep the peace has been done in a Young Adult novel (and, yes, I'm focusing on Young Adult novels written before and during The Giver's release, at least when I read The Giver).

So the movie getting the color wrong makes me doubt if it can get anything right. The color in the trailer is so distracting for me that I can't remember what was shown in the trailer. If I ever do an insightful look at a The Giver trailer I will have to watch it a few more times to review it.