Movie Review: The Maze Runner

The Maze Runner (2014)


Thomas is deposited in a community of boys after his memory is erased, soon learning they're all trapped in a maze that will require him to join forces with fellow "runners" for a shot at escape.  Short synopsis of The Maze Runner taken from IMDb.com  

To be honest...  I wouldn't have thought a film with such an interesting premise could be so...  uninteresting.  And predictable.  And have so little actual maze running!

The Maze Runner, plot-wise, is more Lord of the Flies met a Boy Scout jamboree and decided to be just a bit nicer.  You know, instead of devolving into... erhm... bloodthirsty savage...  kids.  We have this full-of-angst teen who wakes up on an elevator, alone, if you don't count some monkey-like thing in a cage that snarls at him when the guy startles it and then is promptly forgotten for the rest of the movie (I wanted to know what happened to the damn jump-scare monkey, OK!?  - OK, I have since been told it was a pig, but it sure looked like a mutant to me), and then reaches the surface to find himself surrounded by jeering young men.  Our guy next finds himself in a cage, where he is met by the leader of the small band of teens who are living in the center of some maze... thing.  They call themselves...  get this originality... "gladers."  Sounds like they are all sales reps for an air freshener concern.  And they live in semi-harmony in this big... glade... space... thing.  There are walls all about them, and some special kids run out the gates in these walls daily and explore the... maze.  Every day.  And every night, the gates shut and the maze makes ominous noises, since it is changing itself on a nightly basis.  And horrible monsters that the kids have dubbed "grievers" (I'd have called them "freaking scary insect robots" myself, but I know that isn't as catchy), stalk through the maze, killing anybody who is dumb enough to stay out overnight.

A bit of Lord of the Flies-related humor. The Maze Runner could have been improved with either more land-squids or more intrinsic illness of the human condition.  Sadly, it seemed lacking in both.  Land squids beats freaking scary insect robots, in my book.  Hmmm...  I can see the match-up in my mind's eye even now.  / Source: community.sparknotes.com

Apparently the leader of the gladers is the first boy who was sent up the elevator, and he had to figure out everything on his own for the first month.  Oh, and without his memory of the life he may have had before.  Everybody comes up without their memory.  While viewing the film, I wanted to ask the screen: "are you sure he was really first?"  Wanna bet the real first guy came up out of the elevator, went into the maze, got caught outside when the gates closed at sundown (I picture some almost comic pounding-of-fists-on-sealed-door and wailing: "let me in!!!"), and is currently digested matter in one of those super-scary monster things? And his five or ten or fifty brothers with him?  How long did it take for one guy to finally say: "hey, I'm not going out there overnight.  There could be super scary robot insect monster things out there, and I feel a heck of a lot safer right here in this glade thingy"?

So anyway, I'm off track.  We have all the teenage boy stereotypes, and a buttload of kids who are - from what I overheard my wife reading in a review about the book series this film is based upon - "redshirts."  The term refers to Star Trek, The Original Series, in which guys (and once even, a woman!  Who'd have thought!) who wore red shirted uniforms were almost always low level characters who ended up getting killed by the hostile thing the ship - or more usually - that the landing party encountered.  Gotta love those Star Trek landing parties.  We are excluding Scotty of course.  He wore a red shirt, and nothing could dampen his zeal.  But there is an exception that proves every rule, don't ya know?

"I'm not going in there.  You go in there!"  "No way.  I'm not going in there.  You go in there."  Leader: "Nobody is going in there.  We'll just stand here and wonder what is in there for awhile." ..........................................................................  "So....  Let's play cards.  Anybody remember what the cards in an UNO deck look like?" / Source: Huffingtonpost.com

So our protagonist, whose name is Thomas, by the way (he recalls his name while fighting in a macho exhibition with one of the alpha-types of the story), ends up going into the maze without permission, and even happens to trick a griever into getting squished while he is running from it.  Boy, nobody ever tried that old trick before, huh?  What have these kids been doing all this time?  Sharpening pointed sticks and practicing basket-weaving?  When Thomas and the guys he was out there to save manage to make it back to the glade, Thomas gets punished by a night in the local jail again (he starts in jail, and now he's back - sounds like he has recidivism problems), and then made into a "Maze Runner."  These are those kids who are specifically allowed to go out into the maze.  See what I mean about a story where people are trapped at the center of a nightly-changing maze being less interesting than you'd have at first thought?

Then somewhere in there, a female is sent up the elevator.  She is the only female in the whole glade.  Now tell me folks, because I'm provincial, but dontcha think theses guys will not have forgotten what females are good for?  Not me.  Maybe the book the film is based on does it better, but if I was this girl, I'd be scared to death to roam by myself.  Heck, a woman today may feel annoyed because she is hit on by men when she doesn't wish to be.  Try being the only young woman among... what, a dozen or more virile young men?

"We tried making little stick figure people too, using tooth picks and lint.  It was exhausting though.  We had to have several people just following folks around and then several other guys acting as messengers to report back here on where everyone was at any given moment.  So we just gave up and used the tooth picks for cleaning our teeth.  The lint we used to embellish the shrubbery in the maze center.  Hey, check this out.  If you look real close, you can see where Crazy Jerry carved his name in the model...  under that wee bush there.  Crazy Jerry...  ah man, he was a hoot and a half.  Too bad we pushed him out into the maze with our sticks just last week.  You'd have loved to have met him.  Still, the boss said he had to go, and when the boss says you gotta go, you gotta go.  Poor Crazy Jerry.  He was out there singing, and telling knock-knock jokes.  I guess the grievers didn't appreciate it.  They came and ate him up in the daytime.  Everybody's a critic, eh?" / Source: pinstake.com

Oh yes, that brings up another issue.  If only one boy comes up a month, and they've been there three years, how come there are more than thirty-six boys around?  We have a wall where we put the names of everyone who comes out of the elevator, and we scratch out the names of the ones who died.  But it sure seemed to me like we had around 40 to 50 boys total.  Or even more.  Maybe it is perception on my part, but it seemed like some convenient math was going on.

Anyway, after Thomas tricks that griever into getting itself squashed, we discover that for some unexplained reason, the rules have been changed.  The doors to the maze stay open at night, meaning the remaining monsters come in, pick off every kid they can (and eat them, was my impression), and we have to make a desperate attempt to escape through the maze.  Coincidentally, the monsters stop killing every kid they can get their mechanical, scorpion-like tail on after finally getting the leader boy, who makes the valiant sacrifice for his guys.  Yeah, like I didn't see THAT coming.

Our remaining boys and lone girl make their way through the maze, dodging greivers, find the escape hatch, and discover it leads to an underground bunker.  Here we find that the people who set up this whole thing are all dead... or are they?  And our bunker-dwelling bunch went by a ridiculous pseudonym that comes out sounding like "Wicked."  And over and over we chant: "Wicked is good....  Wicked is good."  And Thomas and the only female... Theresa, it is, were part of this Wicked.  And so of course, one of the boys makes a desperate effort to stop Thomas from leaving the maze ("The maze is my life," he lamely quips), and one of the other boys makes the stereotypical sacrificial gesture, stepping in front of the bullet.  Cue death scene.

"You know, with a little Spackle and a few window trimmings, this could make a pretty decent little apartment.  Oh, you wanted my opinion on the girl in the elevator?  Well I'd say...  she's a girl.  Yup, for sure.  Or a boy who is very feminine looking.  But I wouldn't hold that against him... her...  it." / Source: richviewherald.com

Now in come the special forces-types to pull out the survivors (how Deus Ex Machina of this story).  Then everybody is hustled off, via helicopter, to the set of one of the Resident Evil films... the one where they all go off to Las Vegas and find it is half buried in sand, and have to fight off zombies in that mess...  But here comes a voice-over by the director of Wicked, who is in fact not dead (or very high-level for a zombie, in either case), and who says they are going to start "Phase Two."  Cue ominous music.  And roll credits.

I know there is some sort of metaphor in this story, but for the life of me, I just don't care all that much.  I'm sure the plot is amusing for the age group it is aimed at, but I don't see it generation jumping like The Hunger Games did.  It's a bit tedious at times, as well as a bit silly, a bit boring, a bit white-knuckle without any brains backing it up, and generally...  well I didn't absolutely hate this film, but I'd not go out of my way to watch the next part of the series, when it comes out.  I rented this because I had heard it was based on Young Adult fiction, and my wife likes that genre, and so I thought we might both enjoy it.  I had previously read a review which said it wasn't a really great film (yes, I know that may have colored my view on the movie, but I don't think you can color "meh" too much more than what it is to begin with), and so I took a chance.  And all I'm out is the buck and a half and the two odd hours or so of viewing.

In the end, a good idea that just didn't work for me.  It's a fairly harmless film, but nothing that will someday be part of the collective consciousness of our culture.  There is some swearing, though no "f-bomb" that I recall, and a fair bit of violence and scary scenes.  My wife said the chase with the griever in the maze was like a horror movie for her, with Thomas looking around corners and waiting for the thing to pop out and start doing it's "screetch, roar, gnash teeth"-bit.  And that's about it. 

If you read the book and wanted to see the film, then you'd have seen it already.  If you, like me, were merely curious, then you could probably put that time to better use.  If you are looking for a cool maze-based film, I'd hope something better is either out already, or will come along and run The Maze Runner right off to cinema oblivion.  Or fire up David Bowie in Labyrinth again.  That '80s flick is a better maze tale than The Maze Runner, even if half of that recommendation is simple nostalgia.


The parting comment:


"I'm just a lonely griever...  I'm just a lonely griever."