First, there was the internationally best-selling Harry Potter series, a slew of books-turned-films that spurred eight movies and created a new trio of movie stars. Then young adult fiction had its vampire moment, ushered in by the Twilight novels and their subsequent adaptations. Following that was a tiny zombie moment (I’m looking at you, Warm Bodies). And now movie-goers are riding the wave of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction.

The latest film to follow this trend of dystopian novels being turned into Hollywood blockbuster is The Giver, released on Aug. 15, based on Lois Lowry’s 1993 novel.

Jonas, played by Brenton Thwaites, lives in a dystopian society that consists of strictly-regulated communities, with no competition, weather, animals or any differences between people. In this world of “sameness,” Jonas awaits his career assignment at his graduation ceremony, where he is surprised to learn that he has been selected as the new “Receiver of Memory,” to be trained by the former receiver who is now the “giver,” played by Jeff Bridges.

As Jonas learns about the past and the things, both good and bad, that his society lacks, the film cleverly injects footage of weddings, births, deaths and wars from around the globe, including some staged and some real footage. The film starts out colorless but injects pops of color, such as a red apple, as Jonas becomes aware of the different pigments.

Bridges plays the titular character with just the right amount of bitterness and heart. Bridges, who is also a producer on the film, had originally planned for his father, Lloyd Bridges, (who passed away in 1998) to play the Giver. Time had other plans, and Bridges’ performance of the character is the most loyal to the novel.

If I had seen the movie without any prior knowledge from the book, I might have enjoyed it more. The novel is not, in any way, a romance, action or even remotely a young adult novel. It is dystopian fiction aimed at a much younger audience. Jonas, played by 25-year-old Thwaites, is now 16 years old instead of 11 and is presented as the central heartthrob instead of the awkward young boy in the novel. His childhood friend and potential love interest, Fiona (Odeya Rush), is given a much larger role in the film in order to play up the romance between them, which is only hinted to in the novel; they’re originally children, after all.

Along with the changes to the main character, the plot of the film has also matured to cater to an audience that read the book as children and are seeing it many years later. It has taken over 20 years for The Giver to be brought to the big screen, but that doesn’t mean that our memories of the novel are so dim that we can’t remember the original plot.

Unlike the Hunger Games or Divergent trilogies, the novel version of The Giver is not the start of a multi-movie run. While the book does have three companion novels set in the same era, the protagonists introduced in the first installment don’t, for the most part, appear in the later novels. This film, therefore, doesn’t seem to be the start of a series of films starring Thwaites. Any potential sequels adapted from the other novels will feature new characters.

I do wish that Jonas’ age hadn’t been so drastically altered, since the film loses some of the novel’s poignancy. Jonas is still out of place, but his younger age in the novel endears the reader to him and his story even more. But it remains a sort of coming-of-age story nevertheless.

Every movie adaptation requires changes to the book’s original plot and not everything is easily translated from page to screen. In the case of The Giver, however, the long-awaited adaptation seems intentionally altered to attract the same audience as its dystopian predecessors, such as the Hunger Games series.

Adaptations of novels don’t necessarily need to be judges based on their faithfulness to the original. I think that the Harry Potter novels and films are classics in their own right, regardless of differences between the books and movies. In the case of The Giver, though, the changes seem to be for the sole purpose of attracting more people to the box office.

It would have been refreshing to see a film featuring young adults or children finding their place in the world without added romance or eye candy.

In today’s slew of dystopian movies, though, this one does provide an original and thought-provoking premise, along with some captivating performances.