The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials

One thing that can be said for the new teen dystopia sequel The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials is that it doesn’t waste any time. As the movie opens, we get a 60 second flashback recap of the last film and then it’s on to more running. It makes sense for a film that has “runner” in the title to have a lot of running, I guess, but man, there is a lot of running in this movie. It should have just been called Maze Runner 2.0: Now With More Running.

The premise of the series overall is that, in the future, a giant solar flare lays waste to most of the earth and somehow triggers a massive outbreak of a virus that turns people into zombie-like monsters called cranks. A few young children appear to be immune to the virus and so they are taken and experimented on like rats in a you-know-what in hopes of finding a cure. In the first movie, they are placed at the center of a giant, monster-filled maze and they are studied as they attempt to find their way out. They do escape and the sequel begins mere moments after the last film ends.

Now the Maze Runner himself, a young man named Thomas, and his friends are out in the ruined part of the earth known as the Scorch. Supposedly, they were rescued from the organization that was experimenting on them, but the very end of the last film revealed that their so-called liberation is actually just another phase of cruel testing. So the world becomes their maze – the remains of a shopping mall buried under the shifting desert sands, the narrow stairways of slumped over skyscrapers, underground tunnels filled with cranks. Thomas and his friends try to track down a resistance movement that’s fighting against their captors and hopefully make it to a safe, non-scorched part of the world.

The film does get a bit repetitious. Four different times in the film, our little group of runners enters some new, vaguely threatening compound and gets introduced to the “man in charge” only to discover that they have to make a narrow escape yet again.

But the film looks great and director Wes Ball films some mean chase scenes, managing to imbue them with a real viscerality and menace. The dread and fear during the underground mall sequence in particular is surprisingly intense for a movie supposedly aimed at teenagers.

Thomas is played by Dylan O’Brien whose sharp-eyed good looks remind me of a young Paul Walker but with stronger acting skills. He makes a convincing leader, and the film overall is not bad, but it does suffer from a mild case of middle-film-it is. Last year’s Hunger Games sequel had the same problem. It’s that feeling that you’re not watching a film that could stand on its own but rather that you’re just seeing one exciting but ultimately incomplete part of a bigger picture.

The middle film of a trilogy doesn’t always have to be like that. I’d argue that The Empire Strikes Back and second Godfather film were both the strongest in each of those series. A middle film can have a strong beginning, middle, and end while still being part of a larger narrative. But I also realize that kind of success is more the exception than the rule.

The Scorch Trials is more about exciting action set-pieces than about character development or even overall plot. It never slows down long enough for most characters to become anything more than place holders or for the story to really coalesce. Still if you’re just interested in a fun, somewhat lightweight action movie, you should run right out and see it.