(The Giver opens today in theaters across Seattle.)

Jeff Bridges has reportedly been trying to adapt Lois Lowry’s beloved 1993 dystopian young adult novel The Giver since the 1990s, when he expected the title role to be played by his father, Lloyd Bridges. More than two decades later, the film has finally been completed and unceremoniously dumped in the cinematic wasteland of August, with Jeff Bridges in the role he intended his father to play. Those twenty years of work and expectation didn’t pay off.

It’s not all bad: The adult cast members, for example, couldn’t be any better. As the eccentric keeper of wisdom, Bridges is entirely believable. In a Community where emotions have been tamed and safety is placed above traits like curiosity, loyalty, and love, The Giver is the only man who remembers what the world was like before, and it’s driven him kind of batty. Sometimes he’s wise, sometimes he’s a rambling jackass, often he’s the pariah left to mutter to himself on the outskirts of society, but Bridges makes every aspect of the character seem believable and part of a whole. Meryl Streep, as the Chief Elder, is impeccable as usual. And the parents of our protagonist, Jonas, are solid, too: Alexander Skarsgård tries the best he can with what little he’s given and even Katie Holmes manages to deliver a unnerving creepiness as Jonas’s justice-obsessed mother.

But the younger actors can’t sustain that kind of quality, which sets The Giver adrift in its earliest scenes. We learn immediately that Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) Fiona (Odeya Rush) and Asher (Cameron Monaghan) are best friends who intend to stay best of friends forever. How do we learn this? They all stand together and solemnly inform each other that they are best friends and that they’ll stay best friends forever. The dialogue is embarrassing and the soap opera-level performances are even worse. By the time Jonas is declared to be the next Receiver of Wisdom to study at the feet of The Giver, we’ve lost interest in him as a character.

Without a protagonist to care about, the audience is left to consider the hundreds of tiny ways in which the film fails the book. Not every aspect of the adaptation is wrong-headed: Rather than having the older man (The Giver) impart memories to the younger man (The Receiver) by having the young man lie shirtless on his stomach as the older man touches his shoulders the way it happens in the book, the film version of The Giver wisely changes the delivery of memories to a more demure wrist-to-wrist transfer, thus sparing us some awkwardness between Bridges and Thwaites.

Some differences simply can’t be helped due to the limitations of different media. The book gradually revealed to the reader that Jonas lived in a black-and-white world, whereas the movie, necessarily, imparts that understanding to the viewer in the first few seconds of the film. The film immediately shows us the limits of Jonas’s world, whereas the book allows us to tentatively discover that there may be a world beyond The Community right along with Jonas. Thanks to these essential differences between what film and prose can deliver, intentional omissions in the book feel like plot holes in the film. If The Giver can be read as an allegory about the importance of a nuanced education that takes in many different viewpoints, the adaptation feels like a teacher trying to help her students cram for a standardized test: All the bubbles get filled in correctly, but the student has no idea why an answer is correct, or how to apply that knowledge to the real world.

And the ending of the book, with its impressive ambiguity, is far superior to the film, which goes Hollywood in the worst way imaginable with a damsel in distress and a race against time and a battle between two best friends. (Although a couple of the book’s more horrifying revelations do unfold in the film exactly as they appear on the page, and for a few uncomfortable seconds The Giver turns into a squirm-fest straight out of a Faces of Death compilation.) The overwrought score and the generic visual effects just feel so tawdry when compared to the intense and disturbing world Lowry constructed in the novel, and since the book costs less than ten dollars and takes a couple hours to read, there is no reason on earth why anyone should recommend the adaptation.