Previously there was A courtyard of thorns and rosesbefore it The Hunger Gamesand before it even Harry Potterit was much harder to find engaging yet accessible books for young adults. One bright spot of this era, however, was Lois Lowry, who wrote thoughtful novels for schoolchildren that took complicated issues like poverty, mental illness, and the Holocaust and presented them in a way that made them memorable for readers as they grew up.

But Lowry’s most popular book was one of the signposts of the young adult dystopia genre. Unfortunately, what made it so brilliant also made it impossible to exist as anything other than a novel. A decade ago, a film adaptation proved that even with some great ideas, sometimes the book is still better.

The Giver had a lot to offer. It was directed by Philip Noyce, who has previously directed a number of action thrillers, such as Salt, Clear and present dangerAnd The Patriot Games. It had an all-star cast, including Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Alexander Skarsgård and Katie Holmes. It came out in August 2014, right at the height of the post-Harry Potter YA dystopia hype, right between the first Divergent Film and the third Hunger Games Film.

The plot is relatively simple. Set in a dystopian future, life in the community has a strict structure. Residents are injected with medication every day, live with assigned families, and upon graduation are assigned a job that they keep for the rest of their lives. Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) grew up happily in the community, but always felt a little different. When he graduated, he didn’t get a normal job. Instead, he is appointed a Memory Receiver, meaning he receives memories of what came before from the Giver (Bridges). But the more Jonas learns about the world he lives in, the more he wants to leave it.

The Giver is a book that is essentially impossible to adapt. It starts with Jonas’ father euthanizing the younger of two twins to keep the community’s population stable, and it doesn’t get much lighter from there. It also deals with the issue of budding sexuality – Jonas is only 12 in the book, and the book shows him being medicated to curb his desires visible in dreams. The film does address these things, but in a gentler way. The euthanasia scene occurs not long before Jonas’s disillusionment with the community, and he is also much older, so his infatuation with his girlfriend Fiona doesn’t seem unusual.

Still, there are some big twists in the film. The entire first act is shown in black and white, and as Jonas learns more about the world, the image becomes richer. It’s not the most nuanced metaphor, but it works brilliantly because the color gradually seeps in. By the time Jonas notices, he’s already seeing a completely different world than the people around him.

Other parts of the plot, however, are adapted much more clumsily. All of the Giver’s memories are described in detail in the book – the feeling of running through the snow, playing on the beach, the concept of love – but that’s harder to translate into images. Instead, the film uses archival footage to portray these concepts. At first, it works well, but eventually the device becomes tedious and feels more like an advertisement for the human experience than a powerful memory.

Flashbacks to the Giver’s past apparently can’t be shown as flashbacks, and so we see him with his deceased daughter Rosemary (Taylor Swift, at a point in her career when critics described her as “country star Taylor Swift”) in holograms, a confusing bit of world-building that looks cool but doesn’t have much thought behind it.

But despite everything, there is nothing to complain about The Giver for trying. It brought one of the most complex and unspeakable books – a book about intangible memories – to the screen. Unfortunately, the result was the beginning of the end of the young adult dystopian trend. Suddenly, fans realized that “the book was better” wasn’t just a purist’s retort. It could also be a dire warning.

The Giver is now streaming on Max.