The Maze Runner

So I saw The Maze Runner and it was just a wasted opportunity. I haven’t read the books or anything, but from the commercials I had seen for this movie I was really hoping for a Lord of the Flies + Cube, with a little bit of Bourne Identity fun with amnesia mixed in. Instead it’s just another “here’s a weird situation, but it all changes when the special kid who changes everything shows up” YA Lit movie. It seems like the movie I wanted to see happened before this one even started, with a bunch of boys creating a society and mapping a giant labyrinth, learning the rules of their world and establishing order. That seems more interesting to me than the story of how that’s all broken because this one kid shows up.

As for the actual movie I saw, the actual kid actors do a decent job with what they’re given. I have a few problems with the writing and direction of the movie though. Everyone in this is so damn cryptic, no one will ever give a straight answer. Early in the movie it seems to me like it would have been easy to say “beyond the wall there’s a big maze, but it’s dangerous in there. The doors close at nightfall and no one has ever survived the night.” That’s two sentences, but it takes like fifteen minutes of screen time to relay this information through a bunch of “Don’t go in there” “Why not?” “Because.”

The problem with the direction is that several of the key action sequences happen in the middle of the night with almost no extra light to illuminate things. To me this made the action hard to follow, and made it hard to make out just what things looked like and how they worked. Why you’d want to make a movie based around special effects monsters and then take pains to not let us see the monsters all that much is beyond me.

Finally, I want to say that I really hate cliff hangers, especially in the first installments of movies. This movie ends with a ton of questions unanswered and reasoning unexplained, with only a “see the next movie as an answer, and that, like this movie overall, is lame.

P.S. Current YA Lit Movie Power Rankings:

1. Harry Potter

2. Hunger Games

3. TBD

4. TBD

5. Maze Runner

6. Divergent & The Giver (tie)

8. Twilight