Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
In the span of 24 hours, I went from not having seen the first “Maze Runner” to seeing both. God bless the internet and streaming content. I might write a full review for 2014’s “The Maze Runner” later, but for now, to focus on the sequel that just came out.
The thing that I can immediately appreciate about the world author James Dashner created, and Wes Ball has now brought to the screen as director twice now, is that while it follows many of the tropes that have been easily identifiable in Young Adult novel adaptations in the past few years, it also tries to approach things with an intriguing appreciation for science fiction ideas rather than just adapting Joseph Campbell’s mythological concepts in a “Star Wars” manner. That’s not to say I would put either “The Maze Runner” or “Scorch Trials” on the level of intellectual sci-fi classics like “2001” or “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” but it at least merits consideration next to some of the more average “Star Trek” films, or the prequel trilogy, as thrilling and entertaining adventure sci-fi. In the YA world, we’re a long way from “The Hunger Games,” but it’s definitely on stronger narrative footing than the “Divergent” series has been.
“The Scorch Trials” picks up right where “Maze Runner” left off, with Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) and the other survivors of the maze on a helicopter, saved from a WCKD (pronounced, wicked) facility where they discovered the truth about what has happened to the Earth. If you need filled in, basically the Earth saw a massive epidemic occurred that devastated the population. Called the Flare disease, since it originated due to the sun scorching the planet with solar flares, the world had to adjust quickly, and a company known as WCKD led the way in trying to discover a cure. What it did find was that some people were immune to the disease. Some of them have been placed in mazes around the world, and entering one such maze was when we first met Thomas, who didn’t remember anything, let alone his own name. As we discovered by the time he and others, who were all immune to the disease, escaped, he used to work with WCKD, but was tossed into the maze when he couldn’t watch people die in the maze anymore. Now, they have been rescued by soldiers led by a man named Janson (Aidan Gillen from “Game of Thrones”), but they find out quickly it’s more hoops by WCKD to go through, leading to another need to escape, this time into the Scorch, a desert wasteland. Thomas and co. are unprepared for what awaits them, but they have to try and reach the far off mountains, where a safe haven for immunes is said to be, along with the Right Arm, a resistance to WCKD that is trying to change the direction the world is going into, or something like that. Basically, Right Arm and immunes = good, WCKD = bad.
While I appreciate Dashner not just rehashing ideas we’ve already seen play out in the “Hunger Games” and “Divergent” franchises, and basing his stories around a central mystery to be solved, without much in the way of a love triangle (thank GOD), I’d be lying if I didn’t say that just trying to write all of that exposition made my eyes glaze over, and my brain shut off. While I enjoy the story on a superficial level, it’s not really one that can be dug into without having some questions about where it’s heading, and why we haven’t gotten a much larger look at the world it’s showing us. The same can be said of “The Hunger Games” (implying that Panem is just the future USA, what’s going on in the rest of the world while this brutal civil war has taken place?), but at least that has a bold, and compelling, central character in Katniss Everdeen. I’ll admit that Thomas, as played by O’Brien, is an interesting hero, but a big part of why he works as the hero is the people he has surrounded himself with, rather than anything he’s done (although we finally get an idea of the type of person he is in the last third of “Scorch Trials”). With Katniss, we know what drives her from the second she volunteers in her sister’s stead at the Reaping; with Thomas, we’re left waiting to find out who this guy is, although we get some glimpses in how he interacts with the other characters, from Alby, Chuck and Gally from the first film to Minho, Teresa, Newt, Aris, Brenda and Jorge in this one. That’s the biggest problem with the mystery Dashner and Ball set up in the first film- in addition to the world as a whole, we also have a mystery as to who the hero is as a character. With a film that is based around so many “hero’s quest” archetypes as this one, that’s not a good thing.
That being said, “The Scorch Trials,” like it’s predecessor, is an entertaining thriller, and while the plot feels overly convoluted, there’s a sense of excitement Ball brings to the world he’s showing us on-screen that keeps us watching, even when this film feels like it should have ended at 2 or 3 different points. No, it’s not a franchise I’m itching to watch continue, but I’m definitely curious to see go through to the end. Yeah, I guess I could read the books and get ahead of the movies, but in that way comes disappointment when that one moment is left out, and you find yourself mentally cursing at the screen until the end. Plus, as I said, I’m not itching to find out. In the long term, that shouldn’t be the case with franchises.
