As you know, we were inundated with adaptations of apocalyptic youth adult novels. We all know it started with The Hunger Games which was a massive commercial and critical success before ending last month with Mockingjay Part 2. Then last year, Divergent was released and quite frankly, it was rubbish. It was followed up this year by the slightly better Insurgent, though I thought that was a poor effort too. However last year, The Maze Runner was released and I quite liked it. It was dark, the characters interesting and there was even some horror elements to it. So how good is the sequel, Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials?
After being freed from the maze, Thomas (Dylan O’Brien, Teen Wolf) and the rest of the survivors find themselves in a facility ran by Janson (Aiden Gillen, Game of Thrones) which is meant to be a safe heaven from WICKED. However they discover that Janson is secretly working for WICKED and they are planning to do experiments on people who are immune to the Flare, including them. So they decide to escape again and they find themselves out in the Scorch, a deadly desert wasteland.
What makes this film suffer to begin with is a lack of urgency. The last film had one main goal, get out of the maze. To go into film theory a bit, it was a simple quest that our heroes had to achieve. Here, the quest is muddled. They need to survive out in the scorch, which is simple yes, but they also need to get to this resistance group in the mountains called The Right Arm for reasons. Because of the muddled quest, you can’t really engage in what they are trying to do. We’re not sure what the big plus of them getting to The Right Arm is, so why are we bothered if they get there?
Now if you remember back to my introduction, and if you don’t go to the doctors it was a minute ago for God’s sake, you’ll note I think the characters were pretty good. Ok Thomas was a bland pretty boy, but everyone else was fine. So in this film do they get extra development and take that extra step? Nope, we concentrate a lot on the bland pretty boy. I’m sure Dylan O’Brien is a fine actor, but because the script essentially gives him a load of questions to ask and no conversations which make him into an actual human being, he’s just a vessel for the viewer rather than an actual character. So the actual characters are sidelines, and gone for a lot of the film, and get very few lines while we have more of the bland one. Bad choice.
Now one of my favourite things from the original were the Greavers, those weird mish mash of massive creatures that felt like an actual threat. So, how can you up that? Well, they don’t. We get Cranks, which are people have suffered from the Flare. They look undead, chase after people and infect others if they bite them. Yes they do sound familiar. Honestly, you’re already accused of being a film that coasts on the success of The Hunger Games, how about not putting zombies, the most overused monster in the world, in your film. Because you can go on all you like about how they are different in the books or that they aren’t traditionally zombies but if it sounds and looks like a zombie, it’s a zombie.
That said, this isn’t a terrible film, mainly because the director Wes Ball (Has only done The Maze Runner films) does have some talent. Usually, you have to care about the characters for the action scenes to be interesting, but Ball does direct them well and makes them look something other than generic. Ok there was one set piece which was ripped directly from The Lost World: Jurassic Park but it was one of the few good things from that film, so I can forgive that. But overall, the action is rather cool.
And the look of this film is excellent. Ball did a great job of realising the scale of the maze in the first film and he makes the scorch look fantastic in the sequel. The look of the abandoned buildings is obviously based on New York but thankfully, the film does treat the audience with some intelligence that we’d either recognise it and if we didn’t, it didn’t need explaining for the film to work. At points, you can feel the heat coming off the screen, which is great for me because I can then turn down the heating and save some money while watching this in the dead of winter. I think Ball is someone we should keep an eye on for the future as he has the potential to be amazing when he gets out of this franchise.
Because the original was surprisingly good, I can only say Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials is a massive disappointment. It seems like the people behind took the complaints of an overly bland main character and a script which mainly relied on asking questions of the original and decided that if we were given more of them, we’d eventually like them. Hopefully because we are getting a slight break before the final film in the trilogy they can go back to the drawing board and make sure they go out with a bang. Because on this trajectory, that film will be unbearable.
Best Moment: I have to say, the pessimistic ending has a whiff of Empire Strikes Back. Maybe I’ve just got Stars Wars on the mind though.
Worst Moment: Realising your main monster is going to be the cranks, which are just tanned zombies.
2/5
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