If you liked The Hunger Games but felt it didn't nearly have enough rules, then The Maze Runner is for you!
The Maze runner takes place sometime in the future, where a young man whose name I forget so I'll refer to him as his slang name he gets called, Greeny, wakes up in an elevator and is constantly taunted and teased by all the other ones for not being as gifted and able as the others despite the fact that he only just woke up there. In particular, a kid who looks as if his mother has been giving him Botox injections since he was a toddler stands as the big boss and Jorjen from Game of Thrones stands as the kid who is all "don't worry, guys, he couldn't possibly harm us" nice man with an awful British accent (strangely despite the fact that the actor portraying him is British). Then there's plenty of others but for the first twenty minutes or so, apparently these guys are the only important characters in the movie
Anyways so they're surrounded by a maze and nobody can go in at night or they'll be devoured by these monsters called "Grievers" which look like John Malkovich's character in The Hitchhikers Guide to the a Galaxy but with bigger legs. And this is where the film starts to get really problematic. First off, this apparently takes place sometime after the apocalypse, but how on earth did whatever company that made this get all that metal? And if they truly wanted nobody to escape, the walls didn't need to be that high. The height that they are seems to be trying too hard to impress the audience. And as for the Grievers, many problems there too. They can apparently climb the walls. Why don't they? And why are they even there in the first place??? They seem to be thrown in just for the sake of having a big bad guy. They don't even explain it at the end during the typical "we need this explanatory monologue to tell the audience why this movie makes sense and they're wrong to be confused" scene at the end. If you don't have a reason for these creatures then your movie is stupid
So anyways, the kid from Teen Wolf, I mean Greeny, and the obligatory Asian guy get locked in the maze for a night and by sheer miracle, Greeny is able to outsmart a griever. Alright maybe it isn't a miracle because Greeny seems to have no problem outrunning him and seems to know what to do, and things only get super complicated when he's squeezing himself through a big set of closing walls and boom, bye bye Griever. So when they get back to the center, he tells them he killed one and instead of being happy they get mad at him. Again, no explanation given why. So he gets promoted to "Runner" status and while out in the maze, where they go find the Griever corpse, they find something lodged in its brain: a canister that acts as their key to their base. Anyways while out in the maze he and wither find that there is a hole where the Grievers get in through, then suddenly the maze goes apeshit on them and they try to make it back to base. Then suddenly a girl pops up! But for some reason she isn't that important. Or maybe she is because she keeps pretty much info dumping the plot.
Ugh, I'm going to stop here because the more I type the angrier I get about this movie. But the whole time, I kept thinking about the hunger games, but this had more rules than it, more plot details and at a few points it got so confusing that it felt like a brain workout to continue watching. And not the good kind like Donnie Darko or an early Cronenberg movie. But that here are so many story lines and rules and plot details that. It was almost like they shoved an entire trilogy into one movie. I would say maybe the book is better but considering the book was written by a middle school student, I don't even think the movie even has that advantage.
Mind you there are some things I liked about the film. It looked pretty and the special effects a re decent, so they get my 3/10 rating for that, but wooden acting and nonsensical plot really does it in
The Maze runner takes place sometime in the future, where a young man whose name I forget so I'll refer to him as his slang name he gets called, Greeny, wakes up in an elevator and is constantly taunted and teased by all the other ones for not being as gifted and able as the others despite the fact that he only just woke up there. In particular, a kid who looks as if his mother has been giving him Botox injections since he was a toddler stands as the big boss and Jorjen from Game of Thrones stands as the kid who is all "don't worry, guys, he couldn't possibly harm us" nice man with an awful British accent (strangely despite the fact that the actor portraying him is British). Then there's plenty of others but for the first twenty minutes or so, apparently these guys are the only important characters in the movie
Anyways so they're surrounded by a maze and nobody can go in at night or they'll be devoured by these monsters called "Grievers" which look like John Malkovich's character in The Hitchhikers Guide to the a Galaxy but with bigger legs. And this is where the film starts to get really problematic. First off, this apparently takes place sometime after the apocalypse, but how on earth did whatever company that made this get all that metal? And if they truly wanted nobody to escape, the walls didn't need to be that high. The height that they are seems to be trying too hard to impress the audience. And as for the Grievers, many problems there too. They can apparently climb the walls. Why don't they? And why are they even there in the first place??? They seem to be thrown in just for the sake of having a big bad guy. They don't even explain it at the end during the typical "we need this explanatory monologue to tell the audience why this movie makes sense and they're wrong to be confused" scene at the end. If you don't have a reason for these creatures then your movie is stupid
So anyways, the kid from Teen Wolf, I mean Greeny, and the obligatory Asian guy get locked in the maze for a night and by sheer miracle, Greeny is able to outsmart a griever. Alright maybe it isn't a miracle because Greeny seems to have no problem outrunning him and seems to know what to do, and things only get super complicated when he's squeezing himself through a big set of closing walls and boom, bye bye Griever. So when they get back to the center, he tells them he killed one and instead of being happy they get mad at him. Again, no explanation given why. So he gets promoted to "Runner" status and while out in the maze, where they go find the Griever corpse, they find something lodged in its brain: a canister that acts as their key to their base. Anyways while out in the maze he and wither find that there is a hole where the Grievers get in through, then suddenly the maze goes apeshit on them and they try to make it back to base. Then suddenly a girl pops up! But for some reason she isn't that important. Or maybe she is because she keeps pretty much info dumping the plot.
Ugh, I'm going to stop here because the more I type the angrier I get about this movie. But the whole time, I kept thinking about the hunger games, but this had more rules than it, more plot details and at a few points it got so confusing that it felt like a brain workout to continue watching. And not the good kind like Donnie Darko or an early Cronenberg movie. But that here are so many story lines and rules and plot details that. It was almost like they shoved an entire trilogy into one movie. I would say maybe the book is better but considering the book was written by a middle school student, I don't even think the movie even has that advantage.
Mind you there are some things I liked about the film. It looked pretty and the special effects a re decent, so they get my 3/10 rating for that, but wooden acting and nonsensical plot really does it in