Pop star Taylor Swift has dabbled in acting before. She lent her voice to last year’s animated The Lorax and showed up a few years ago in the rom-com Valentine’s Day. She has also appeared on the small screen in an episode of the hit show New Girl. Now, along with Katie Holmes, she’ll be joining Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep in The Giver, an adaptation of Lois Lowry’s novel, which Phillip Noyce is set to direct.
The YA sci-fi novel takes place in a, get this, “futuristic, dystopian world” where all memories and emotion have been removed. The responsibility of remembering the past is instead given to a single person known as The Receiver. As for the plot, it will centre on a young man named Jonas, played by Brenton Thwaites, who is selected to be the next Receiver. While undergoing training from The Giver (Bridges), he struggles coming to terms with the duty that he is about to take on. No word on who Swift will play but Holmes is said to be taking the role of Jonas’ mother.
Admittedly, I haven’t read the novel but my level of care and/or concern for this project could not be any lower. I am so sick of all these YA adaptations that are hitting theatres and seeing them all fail, one after another (aside from The Hunger Games, of course), makes me very happy. It’s not that I take joy in seeing movies tank, (ok, well sometimes I do), but the more YA adaptations that bomb, the sooner we’ll stop seeing them.
Nothing about The Giver makes me think that it won’t suffer a similar fate to something like The Host or The Mortal Instruments and I’m actually excited to see it fall flat on its face. Maybe then Hollywood will stop giving us this garbage and go back to producing original ideas.