PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD!!!
Greetings people of the Internet, I’m back! Apologies for the absence, but I’ve spent the last two months holding two jobs, followed by acclimating to the new one, and having precious little free time to go watch movies or have fun in general. The paychecks have been nice though.
Anyway, I’m getting back into the swing of things with a movie that’s been out for a little while but I’d only just gotten to see: Maze Runner. Based on a book by a guy I’ve never heard of, it’s a series that I know nothing about. With that in mind, I can only judge it by its own merit and how much I wanted to flip a table by the end (spoilers: less than TMNT, more than Guardians). While I try my best to keep my life spoiler free, I had heard some mediocre things about this one so I had already come in with lowered expectations. As a result, I had a mostly pleasant experience with the film…until the last ten minutes.
The basic plot, as set up by the trailer that you’ve probably seen if you’re thinking about watching it, is that there are a bunch of kids trapped at the center of a maze for unspecified reasons. There’s running, there’s a maze, and there are terrifying creatures to ramp up tension at every turn. And honestly, it is for the most part a decent romp…until the last ten minutes.
The main character, Thomas, wakes up on an elevator with no clue what’s going on. Right out the gate the movie does a good job of setting up terror and confusion and intrigue. He’s greeted by a group that I was mentally calling “The Lost Boys” for the whole run of the movie. Antics ensue and you get the typical run of impressive set pieces, decent CGI, and occasional child murder. It’s a mostly entertaining romp with many questions raised and precious few answered. The actors do their jobs well enough, you mostly buy into the setting, and you get a good show for the price of admission until… you get the idea. There are still better films out there, but if you’ve got nothing better to do with your afternoon it’s not a terrible way to kill a few hours.
So that’s the spoiler free version. From this point on, I’m going to assume that you either don’t care about spoilers or have already seen the movie and are curious whether a stranger on the Internet agrees with you or not.
Read on at your own peril and amusement.
I’d have to say the movie would have ranked as a solid “Good” in my notebook if not for that ending, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The primary issue that this film has is that while it’s great at setting up mysteries, it’s less great at delivering the payoff. A sticking point for me is that it maintains some of those mysteries by having characters behave like morons. From the very beginning it’s made clear that the Maze is dangerous, a place not to go and such. Instead of having someone simply explain that the gates shut themselves every night and anyone trapped outside will be ripped to shreds by giant techno-spider death machines, we get to see the main character tackled by the guy who’s totally not going to be an enemy by the end of the film. Even after the tackle (kudos to the effects team btw, I half felt like I was the one hit by it) they don’t actually say that’s what happens, they just wait ‘til the gates close and then act like Thomas was an idiot for not expecting that to happen.
That was a lot of words to complain about a single scene, but the basic issue throughout is that no one questions obvious things they should be questioning. I haven’t read the books and it’s entirely possible that that’s the exact point the author was trying to make. But all I’ve got to go on is a movie full of characters not asking very obvious, very relevant questions, and by the end It’s outright angering to me that some things are allowed to slide. To me this movie has the exact opposite problem that a lot of films have: it’s actually lacking in exposition. Showing, rather than telling, is how the medium is supposed to work and it’s hard to fault a movie for emphasizing that approach to storytelling. However, when we have no clue what’s really going on by the end of the movie unless we’ve already read the books, something’s failed in the telling.
The Maze itself is awesome to look at, though I can’t really accept the excuse for them not climbing to the top being that the vines didn’t grow tall enough. There were plenty of trees inside the vale; they could have built a proper scaffold to get to the top. The Maze shifts daily, making every run a little different. Mostly it’s an excuse to have several cringe-inducing moments of Thomas nearly getting pancaked. The Maze monsters, called Grievers, are pretty horrifying to look at, but slightly head scratching in light of the revelations at the end.
And that ending, hoo boy. So, the bulk of the movie is high paced, heart pounding, and even occasionally properly scary. Then we get to the big reveal of what’s really going on. The whole point of this massive maze is science. Not just any science, of course, science to save the human race from extinction. A phrase repeated often enough you’ll be rolling your eyes every time you hear it gets even more ridiculous when you hear what it actually stands for “Wicked is good.” Wicked stands for World In Catastrophe: Killzone Experiment Department.
Congratulations, you’ve just made the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division sound a whole lot less silly.
Apparently this group is tasked with testing exceptional children with an immunity to some sort of super virus (though the infection can be forced it seems), and to do that testing, they must construct a colossal environment for the express purpose of putting them at extreme stress to alter their brain chemistry or some such nonsense. It’s asinine, it’s out of far left field, and nothing about it real. THEN it’s revealed that something else entirely may be going on because the woman who finished explaining all this and then shot herself is revealed two scenes later to be alive and well and then the credits roll. It’s all well and good if the characters are clueless as to what’s going on, but I don’t like it when I feel obligated to look up the source material just to understand what I just watched.
So yeah, those are my closing thoughts on The Maze Runner. Coming up next a movie that should be a bit more fun: The Boxtrolls.
— Dan D (guest movie reviewer)
