Young Adult Month - Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials

In the not too distant future, after a disaster takes place

An angry guy with Rage Issues, among the last of the human race

He was just a media nerd, he ranted a lot, it was quite absurd

But he was special for some reason, so bad men decided it was Rage Issues season

He’ll star in 3 movies, 4 if we squeeze him dry

He’ll go and join a rebel force, as he’ll slowly lose his mind

Now keep in mind, he’s just a guy, no different from you or me

So, he’ll have to learn how to survive, with the help of YA Movies

Franchise Roll call:

The Hunger Games

The Maze Runner

Diiiiiiiivergent

If you’re wondering how he posts his thoughts, and who he’s posting for

Repeat to yourself, it’s just a theme, and stop thinking any more

It’s Young Adult Month!

OK, here’s where all bets are off, welcome to Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. The funny thing is there’s not a lot of change when it comes to production, Wes Ball is still directing and the writer was… one of the writers for the first one (T S Nowlin, who may or not have been involved with Fant4stic, but his track record isn't great regardless) There was definite room for improvement, especially when it came to the writing but they were off to a decent start

And this film was given a larger budget to work with, $61m which means it can be a bit more ambitious. The film was successful, making $312m, but the critical reception, whilst poor to start with gets worse with each instalment, this one manages a disappointing 46% with an average 5.4/10, and a 54% audience score averaging 3.4/5

The crew who escaped the maze are brought to a facility, run by a Mr Jansen, where they meet survivors from other mazes. All seems well at first but Thomas has a bad feeling, one confirmed when he meets with Aris, a survivor from a different maze. They discover that survivors are being drained dry for something found in their blood. (I’ll get back to this, believe me)

With that, Thomas, Aris and the rest of the maze survivors escape and have to contend with the scorch, a vast desert created by the solar flares and the Cranks, essentially zombies infected with the flare virus mentioned in the last movie. They seek a resistance group named the Right Arm but can they survive the journey?

OK, let’s start with some positives, it looks good, especially given the budget. The desert landscapes look good, the broken cities look good, with decent action scenes that are well shot and executed. The set-pieces are fantastic from a pure adrenaline standpoint, you can feel the tension as the glass breaks on the building, you feel their panic as they’re running from the cranks. You feel the disorientation Thomas feels in that nightclub scene.

I put this mostly down to direction, Wes Ball handles a group of young and established actors masterfully, and knows how to frame the action without it feeling jarring. Giancarlo Esposito and Rosa Salazar give great performances as Jorge and Brenda respectively but the whole cast does a great job with the material they have, it’s just a shame that, some good moments aside, this script is rather lacklustre and again I feel it’s the lack of accuracy to the book is to blame.

So, the idea that WCKD is draining people dry because there’s something in their blood that can cure the flare. This opens a massive plot-hole which simply is: why the maze trials? If the cure is in the bloodstream, what does the maze trials accomplish? This isn’t a thing in the book, the trials exist so that WICKED can analyse the ‘killzone’ aka the brain and figure out what it is about the immunes that mean the virus doesn’t affect it. Which means putting it under psychological stress has a point, making their blood special undermines the entirety of the last movie.

There’s also an indication there are loads of mazes which wasn’t really a thing in the book, there were only 2 but… Because the end goal of crossing the desert is so vague in the film, it really loses points when it comes to structure with a lot of between scenes just coming off as padding. In the book, there was an end goal because crossing the scorch was, in fact, the next stage of the trials (it’s the title of the book/film and they didn’t even get that right.) They were told they were all infected at that the cure was at the other end, a simple way of immediately injecting structure into your narrative.

Speaking of structure, there are a couple of weird cuts that broke my immersion a bit. The first in the mall, where after hiding in some rubble we cut to daylight with no idea where the cranks went, the second and more jarring is the building set-piece, they defeat one crank and we jump to them running down a fire escape in a nearby building, no idea how they passed all the other cranks they were being pursued by.

This does reflect the movie’s weird obsession with taking plot points of the book and putting them on steroids. They’re not taken into a base, they’re rushed in as the place is being assaulted by Cranks, Jorge isn’t just betrayed by his own men, he’s attacked by WCKD and activates an explosive as they make their escape. It isn’t just a chase in the sewers, it goes up a massive fallen building, and Brenda nearly falls through a window to her death.

I understand the need to focus on action heavy moments of the book and add tension, as I said, all of them are well shot and directed, but it does come at a cost, not just the whole WCKD blood draining thing making no sense, but also the threat of the flare. In the film, they’re all told they’re immune to the flare, so how does Winston get infected? In the book, they’re not told they’re immune, just that they all have it, giving them a sense of urgency that this film was in dire need of.

Also, the Flare has an incubation period that lasts several days, if not weeks, Winston should not have been displaying signs of infection this early on. Neither should Brenda when she was infected later. 

The other problem is characters. I don’t feel like any of them other than Thomas and Teresa got any time in the spotlight this time, the worst affected is Minho, who in the book takes up a leadership role and is pretty good at it. And doesn’t get captured at the end so Thomas can make a speech! Aris’ character doesn’t interact much with any of the leads, including, surprisingly, Thomas so his character comes off a little flat.

I don’t think this film understood the Right Arm very well at all. For a start they weren’t introduced properly till well into the next book, but by putting them as the definitive good guys and WCKD as the definitive bad guys does both of them a disservice. I’ll talk more about the Right Arm in my Death Cure review but having WCKD doggedly pursue them and having Ava kill the Doctor at the end were mistakes, especially as this movie tries to explore some of the moral ambiguity.

I talk of course about the actions of Teresa. She doesn’t have much to say or do in the film, much like in the last one, but what she does has major impacts on the narrative, which is good considering she had nothing to do at all in the last film. I at least empathise with her motivations, although her performance is in my opinion, the weakest of the bunch.

I’ll say her role in the book is a little perplexing, but it makes use of the telepathic connection between her and Thomas that wasn’t established in the last film, they make it different in a way that makes a decent amount of sense and it is said that she had her memories. Speaking of memories and the problem with the Right Arm, it’s revealed that Thomas had been secretly giving locations of WCKD bases to the Right Arm and damn does that miss the point

It is entirely ambiguous in the main trilogy whether or not Thomas was a good person before he was put in the maze. In fact, it’s sorely hinted that he wasn’t (although later books would soften this a bit). The overall answer to this arc is that it doesn’t matter, which is why you can be satisfied even though he never gets his memory back, putting him as a definitive good guy just raises questions like what took you so long? Why would the Right Arm take the word of a teenager? And why am I now rooting for Tom getting his memories back now?

Maze runner: The Scorch Trials has some great set-pieces and action, helped by great performances for all the main cast but it runs into a trouble as there’s no sense of urgency when it comes to the plot. It’s deviates from the book so heavily, it creates a bunch of massive plot holes that only go to take you out of the story.

Rating 40/100