Review of the movie "The Giver"

The townspeople of the movie “The Giver” are built of a population that is mostly indoctrinated to strip themselves of their humanity. The people have no ties to their heritage(even their parents and the children are separated to other families), religion, or even their emotions. Most of the town people have been indoctrinated to not express any human emotion even as far as scolding people for using expressive language such as feelings in speech. The townspeople don't even get a choice in their occupations; they are picked for their life role after they are done with school. Jonas is the main character we follow. He has been specially picked to become a member of a group of 2 people of an apprentice and a teacher. Jonas has been picked to experience humanity to prevent the human experience from dying. Jonas learns of human experiences based on real world events with various tones and feelings such as tranquility, joy, community, triumph, love, and horror. The leader of this group believed it would create a unity and higher moral code of the townspeople and prevent mass suffering in people due to human atrocities(war, poverty, and famine). The elderly and children not born of required weight. Are to be executed in the community. However the townspeople are so indoctrinated that they don't call it “execution” they call it “sending to else were”. They do this to prevent the people of the town from experiencing loss and death of loved ones. All of the townspeople must take a dose of their medicine each morning to null their emotions, feelings, and free thought. The medicine effectively makes them emotionless zombies. Jonas stops taking his meds by fooling the injector by stamping an apple on the injector with bits of his blood on it to fool the system. To highlight the lack of emotions in the townspeople and their dogmatic beliefs most of the movie is in greyscale. When Jonas stops taking his meds he starts to see the world in color symbolizing a new dimension of the world he can view and think. Jonas finds his teacher on the ground horrified yelling that he is in danger. Jonas tries to help him up, but gets a telepathic lesson about war. Jonas sees a memory of a soldier from the Vietnam war and experiences confusion, mortification, and terror for the first time. Jonas storms out the room shocked by what he saw and understands. The quote by Khalil Gibran “your pain is the breaking of the shell that encapsulates your understanding” sums up this entire moment of Jonas gaining this new information. Jonas eventually tries to teach his friends about how to be human and become less dogmatic in their beliefs. Jonas finds a map of the land they live in. He finds that the human experience is blocked off with magic. Jonas saves a kid from execution and flees the town on a motorcycle. Jonas breaches the magic wall releasing human experiences to everyone in town. Meanwhile his teacher is arrested for teaching Jonas how to live as a human. Some of Jonas’s friends and Jonas’s teacher are placed on death row for learning from Jonas. Some of the prisoners are scheduled for execution. Before the execution Jonas’s friend tells the room they are scared. The room did not understand what she meant. Jonas’s teacher tells the room she has every reason to be afraid. The leader tells him that he should not tell the room about his teachings but continues to tell them that their experiences were stripped from them. This movie has the theme of loss of humanity at a social level. As a result the society still carried out atrocities like the doctors/executioners and the drone strike workers like Jonas’s friend. Problems are inevitable; they cannot disappear from human existence. As a stem major I was taught to minimize risk and the chance of risk not to completely eradicate problems. I was taught to lower the amount of problems in computer systems.