Don’t break out the pitchforks and torches just yet, literary friends. The footage revealed from the Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep-led adaptation of The Giver does not make us want to burn down Hollywood. Yet.

Fans of books you’re forced to read in elementary school have been cautiously excited to see the young adult novel The Giver brought to the big screen, and today the film’s first trailer found its way online. It’s another futuristic dystopian tale of ‘the man’ trying to tell people how to live and people learning to stand up for their basic rights, but unlike Divergent, The Hunger Games, and Mortal Instruments it is not an epic trilogy featuring a twenty-something hottie meant to inspire young girls while simultaneously teaching them that falling in love with a ludicrously ripped bad boy will work out in the end (even if it puts the lives of everyone you love in danger).

No, The Giver is a bit more like The Matrix than recent big screen YA fiction. There is the world our protagonist knows, and then there is the ‘real world,’ which he will need Jeff Bridges help to see. You can view the first trailer below.

It’s still far too early to tell whether or not Hollywood will turn this beloved story into a CGI nightmare, but the glimpses shown here certainly do a lot to capture one’s imagination.

The Giver opens nationwide April 15, 2014.

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James Shotwell

James Shotwell is the founder of Under The Gun Review. He loves writing about music and movies almost as much as he loves his two fat cats. He's also the co-founder of Antique Records and the Marketing Coordinator for Haulix. You should probably follow him on Twitter.

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