After reading the award-winning novel “The Giver” by author Lois Lowry, I held high expectations for the movie that was released on Aug. 15.  But sadly, multiple aspects of the story fell short.

The book is set in a utopian society, where the main character Jonas is put to the ultimate test to save his community as well as the baby Gabriel, who is in danger of being put to death.

By analyzing memories of the past and the behavior of his closest friends, Asher and Fiona, Jonas realizes that his community is not as perfect as he was taught to believe.

The novel’s elementary themes: the significance of memories and the value of hope and longing, are not illustrated in the movie with enough depth. Rather than highlighting these factors, it seems as if the script barely touched upon them, leaving the viewer both confused and disappointed.

Instead, they were replaced with the generic theme of love and romance, commercialized for the general public. The book contained absolutely no love story between the characters, except between Gabriel and Jonas.

Instead of making “The Giver” a new twist on the popular dystopian genre, the directors transforms the plot into the same “Hunger Games” and “Divergent” love saga. The disregard for two fundamental themes, replaced by an irrelative one infuriated me beyond imagination.

In the book, Fiona and Asher, Jonas’s closest friends, are flat characters who did not have much significance to the plot line. But the movie is heavily dependant on these two characters, changing a majority of the story.

A discrepancy that affected me more than others was that Brenton Thwaites, the actor who plays Jonas, made the character look more like a 16-year-old heartthrob rather than an awkward 14-year-old. To make things worse, his acting wasn’t as thorough and deep when compared to the spectacular cast of Meryl Streep, Jeff Bridges and even Taylor Swift.

On a more positive note, people who have not read the book will most likely enjoy the movie. It’s a dystopian movie and that is filled with teenage romance, which appeals to many movie viewers.

The movie is shown in black and white, until the point where Jonas can start to see all the colors, which was both creative and accurate.

If you’ve read the book, save your money by skipping the movie. If you haven’t read the book and you like seeing dismal communities struggling for perfection, you might actually like “The Giver.”