By Andrew Russell
LifeAtStart.com Reporter
The Maze Runner is about Thomas, a teenager who is thrown into a group of young boys with a makeshift government after his memory has been erased, and soon realizes he’s trapped in the center of an enormous maze.
Sounds pretty good, right? It was! For the first two thirds or so…
First off, it’s one of those movies cashing in on the Hunger Games success with the teenage survival-epic, so I wasn’t thrilled about going to see this movie to start. As it went on, however, it grew on me and I found it to be more entertaining than I had initially thought it would be.
In my mind, the best part about the m
ovie is the atmosphere. It makes you feel caged in, and it has a feeling of hopelessness and desperation that you would hope for in this genre. Part of this feeling has to be thanks to the directing with its shots of the looming iron and stone walls and the multiple shots of closing, tight spaces. There is little to no aerial shots of the surroundings which also adds to the feeling of wonder about what’s truly outside the walls.
If there is anything to be wrong with this movie it would be the plot holes that start to pop up about an hour in, and that grow bigger and bigger as you think about it in the car on your way home. Like I said, it’s a good movie for about the first two thirds until the plot holes become too apparent to assume they’ll be explained later (very few holes are explained later). This movie had a good beginning, but as they added more to the complexity of the story, they struggled to come up with reasonable explanations for things, sometimes giving no explanation at all. Along with this, the ending left me mildly upset, as it was clear they hoped for a franchise and that this was a set up just for that.
Another thing that I didn’t like, but something that couldn’t be helped, was that this was an adaption of a book. I feel like everything today is only an adaption of a book (see The Hunger Games), a remake (see Mad Max: Fury Road), or a sequel in an over done franchise (See the Fast and the Furious). Very few movies are original anymore.
All this being said, I would give this movie a 7/10 stars. It’s worth seeing if you want something to do. I don’t think I’ll be going to the next one of these that comes out, though. Or either of the two-part third installment which I’m sure they’ll be doing like everything else is.
Contact Andrew Russell at [email protected]