Let's Go Out To The Movies: The Maze Runner (PG-13 - 20th Century Fox - 1 hr, 43 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

Directed by Wes Ball
Written by Noah Oppenheim,
Grant Pierce Myers and T.S. Nowlin

The Maze Runner is another situation like Divergent in that it is a movie based on the first installment of a YA book series that I probably would not be aware of if not for two things. 1) it's the only thing coming out this week, and 2) my younger sister really wanted to see it. It's no secret by now that I have a certain bit of disdain for the YA genre. It isn't even a genre, its a marketing term, and quite a few of the films coming out under that marketing term are terrible, cheap cash-ins on the current phenomenon of vaguely dystopic SF in the wake of The Hunger Games' runaway success.

Considering that pedigree, my expectations for Maze Runner were that it would be "Hunger Games for boys with all the socioeconomic metaphors stripped out", and it is essentially that, but it also turns out to be a mediocre if serviceable genre entry, that completely falls apart by the end. Darn.

Our story concerns a group of seemingly abducted boys with no memory of their past lives besides their names, living in a forest Glade surrounded on all sides by a gigantic maze filled with cyborg slug monsters called "Grievers" that keep them inside said maze. Every day, the boys send Runners into the maze to search for a way out, a task made difficult by the fact that the walls of the maze rearrange themselves every night, when the maze closes and the cyborg slugs come out to play. When our nominal hero Thomas shows up, things start to change. Supply lines from the maze's unseen creators start to dry up, and the first girl shows up in the Glade, something that seemingly angers the Grievers enough for them to abandon their nocturnal habits and start attacking the camp. This eventually incites Lord of the Flies style shenanigans that threaten to destroy the tenuous community of the Glade.

I couldn't find any good pictures of the
Grievers online, so here's my rendition.

If there is anything to say about The Maze Runner, it's that it does feel like Hunger Games for boys with all the socioeconomic allegory stripped out in favor of setting up and solving various puzzles. It also looks pretty good, not terribly inventive, but well executed and it has it's own identity. If shown clips from Maze Runner along side Divergent or Hunger Games, one could tell them apart. The maze itself looks gorgeous, and the Grievers are interestingly designed, unfortunately, we barely get to see them amid the handheld cinematography and a couple of baffling editing decisions.

In particular, Thomas just ran into the maze at night to help an injured Runner, and they come across a Griever. They start running for the nearest corridor, which is slowly becoming more narrow. The Runner hopes that they can get through in time and seal themselves off from the slug. Thomas has other ideas, and lures it towards the narrowing walls, but instead of us seeing the result of our hero's ingenuity and quick thinking, we just cut to the injured one screaming and then to the next morning as they exit the maze.

It is actually marginally interesting to see the relations between the boys play out, but the more that gets revealed about the nature of the maze and why it exists, the less interesting things get, culminating in a "twist", that instead of having been built up by the preceding film, feels tacked on in order to get potential sequels. In fact, I had to check to be sure that it wasn't a Shyalaman gig.

The Maze Runner, isn't terribly compelling stuff, but it at least has it's own identity, and when held against it's contemporaries it's a piece of fried gold, but that isn't saying much. There's a reason this was dumped in September.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B