Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials" Finds Its Way Out of Its Genre's Limitations

Directed by Wes Ball
Written by T.S. Nowlin

(PG-13 - 20th Century Fox - 2 hrs, 12 mins.) 

Alo Party Peoples.

In 2012, the film adaptation of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games took the world by storm, and for good reason. It was an exciting action film with a welcome strong female lead that also had a brain, and was willing to use that brain to encourage its young fan base to think critically about issues as diverse as celebrity culture, systemic economic disparity, and manufactured media narratives. Even if the movie itself was kinda iffy in spots, it's cultural impact is more than welcome.

Over the next couple of years, the less inspired copycats - including Hunger Games' own sequels - were arriving in full force; culminating in 2014 with the Unholy Trinity of Divergent, The Maze Runner, and The Giver. All three of these films were either dull, lazy, or just plain terrible, because the nature of what would soon be named the YA movie is that they are cheap to produce and guaranteed to make a profit since they have a built-in audience of easily impressed teenagers. The Giver took a highly symbolic story that only works in the formless realms of the written word and turned it into an embarrassing action movie version of Pleasantville that hinges on self-parody, while Divergent was the laziest possible version of "Vaguely-Totalitarian-Society-As-Metaphor-For-High-School-Social-Cliques" imaginable, and worse yet it seemed to take pride in being so.

Of that Unholy Trinity, The Maze Runner earned the dubious distinction of being the least terrible. It wasn't good by any means, the sets were sparse and ugly, the director had no idea how to shoot action, the acting was amateur at best, but it at least tried to be its own thing, and in this genre that might as well be Citizen Kane.

The first one had the premise of a bunch of adolescent boys trapped in a secluded forest glade surrounded on all sides by a gigantic constantly shifting maze, and it focused on their struggle to escape once the monsters living in it started to abandon their nocturnal habits and attack the boys directly. It's kind of like The Village, and like that film it ends in a headslappingly stupid twist; namely that they were placed in that maze by the "World Catastrophe Killzone Department" (that is not a joke) in order to preserve humanity after a solar flare-induced zombie plague wiped out most of the planet.

The Scorch Trials picks up a week later after W.C.K.D. has moved the boys from the maze to a holding facility to harvest their blood in hopes of finding a cure for the plauge. After hearing rumors of a resistance group called the Right Hand attacking W.C.K.D. facilitites, they escape in dramatic fashion and set off on a trek across the zombie-ridden desert to find sanctuary in a rumored safe zone untouched by the plauge.

If the first Maze Runner was trying to be The Village, then The Scorch Trials is closer to Mad Max, and it works surprisingly well. Sure, it has almost nothing to do either story-wise or tone-wise eith the first movie, but considering that the first movie is... the first movie, that is a very good thing. Getting out of the maze allows for kinds of action scenes other than walking down a corridor while mysterious creatures stalk you in the darkness. And since franchise helmer Wes Ball has finally figured out how to shoot good action, now we get shootouts, huge brawls, chases, it's the greatest B-movie ever made...

...but it is still a B-movie, better than the first one, mind you, but neither film has much going on under the surface. The first film is also a glorified B-movie, but it was a slow, dull one, this one has things happen, which makes it far better as far as I'm concerned. Bottom line, it's a pretty decent pulp sci-fi action movie, and in the doldrums of September they could certainly have done worse.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5