![]() It feels like a film that is nothing except kinesis, shooting and explosions for their own sake. half the reason they are in a collapsed building is so that the 3D camera can look up/down at them through a slowly cracking glass window, or the destruction of Jorge’s stronghold where the explosions are rigged to come at us in 3D depth.Įqually, the film throws in several hordes of zombies – it should be worth noting in the book that the Cranks are supposed to be merely infected with something that is turning them insane but to differing degrees where some of them are also able to hold conversation, whereas here they are no more than standard horror movie zombies. All of the action is maximised for the 3D camera ie. We get large-scale scenes of Dylan O’Brien and Rosa Salazar falling through a collapsing building, another sequence where the rebel lair is blown up as the WCKD troops arrive and a big shootout climax. Your average 1980s B-budget Italian copy of Mad Max 2 (1981) would have managed to get through this in a third of the running time whereas the feeling here is that Wes Ball drags each of these scenes out into a massive series of set-pieces because the film has absolutely nothing else happening. ![]() The group pass through ruins, encounter zombies, are drugged by a warlord, encounter two different factions of rebels and that is about it. ![]() This is quickly abandoned and the film heads out into the desert where it seems to wander around in a big circle trying to figure out what it is doing. However, this is quickly resolved where it feels like all that the film has done is pillaged the essence of Michael Bay’s The Island (2005). The first few scenes with the kids in the WCKD labs are probably the most interesting because there is a very minor sense of them also being in a labyrinth and trying to puzzle out the nature of the world. This time there is no conceptual puzzle with the characters try to work out what kind of world they are in – all we have is just a chase movie with them being pursued from one location to the next.Įven then, The Scorch Trials gives the impression that the filmmakers didn’t have a clue what type of film they wanted it to be and so just kept pillaging other films that had come before. The disappointment of The Scorch Trials is that it features the same characters and production crew as before but it is a completely different film. The Maze Runner was a good conceptual mystery that left you wondering what was going on, even if it faltered when it came to the weakly contrived end explanation. The escapees – (l to r) Thomas Brodie Sangster, Kaya Scodelario, Dylan O’Brien, Ki Hong Lee, Alexander Flores and Dexter Darden Even the title of the film no longer makes sense – in the book the crossing of the Scorch was meant to be the group’s second trial akin to their passing through the maze in the first book/film, whereas here it is just a standard post-holocaust desert wasteland. Existing characters are either completely rewritten or else new ones invented. The book has a much more convoluted plot involving telepathy between Thomas and Teresa, Aris leading a different faction through The Scorch and being romantically involved with Teresa, no Right Arm, no scenes where they are lured into a nightclub, and much more in the way of machinations with the improbably acronymed WICKED (renamed as WCKD in the film). ![]() It should probably serve as a blanket condemnation of The Scorch Trials that the film has essentially thrown the book out, a tactic that has worked in Hollywood precisely – let me think – never. The second of the books, The Scorch Trials (2010), has been adapted here and reunites most of the principal personnel from the first film. Like all other YA works, The Maze Runner was based on a series of books – so far five-books by US writer James Dashner, consisting of two sequels and then two prequels to the original. Where most of the other films – The Hunger Games, Divergent (2014) and their various sequels – rehashed standard dystopian stories that were well and truly tired to anyone who had watched/read much in the way of science-fiction, The Maze Runner did something different and created a conceptual puzzlebox with the characters having to find their way out of a massive maze deathtrap. The Maze Runner was a breath of fresh air amidst these. It was another of the Young Adult films that have become legion in the 2010s, following the wake of the YA science-fiction scenarios popularised by The Hunger Games (2012).
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