One of the main draws of this film for me was the fact that, according to the trailers, the cast members were predominantly English youngsters.  And we all know how much I enjoy Brits talking in seamless American accents.  Also, coming from the young adult disappointment that was The Giver, I felt the need to sit down and see an action-packed young adult movie.

Here’s the round-up of visual effects artist Wes Ball (A Work in Progress)’s  adaptation of James Dashner’s The Maze Runner.

Please note that there may be spoilers.  Read at your own risk.

THE STORY:

The film opens with a young man, Thomas (Dylan O’Brien – Teen Wolf), inside a huge rusty metal elevator on its way up somewhere.  He gets sick and promptly faints.  When he wakes up, he finds that he has reached the top – a clearing in the woods – surrounded by young men who seem to have been expecting his arrival, or at the very least, unperturbed that he turned up inside a metal crate.  Thomas soon realizes that he has no memory about himself or where he came from, but his panic is assuaged by Alby (Aml Ameen – Lee Daniels’ The Butler), the leader of the group who call themselves ‘Gladers’, telling him that this is normal and everybody is suffering from the same condition.  Alby, along with his second-in-command Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster – Love Actually) has assigned him his personal guide, Chuck (Blake Cooper – Necessary Roughness), who show Thomas the simple way of life in the Glades.  They have very few rules, but the top two are that everybody has a role to fulfill in their survival and that only the Runners, led by Minho (Ki Hong Lee – She Has a Boyfriend), are allowed to go past the Glades’ walls, and never after nightfall.  Thomas learns that there is a vast maze outside, one that no one has ever survived a whole night in, but it has been three years and the runners are still nowhere near finding a way out.  Things take a turn for the worst when for the first time ever, a girl, Teresa (Kaya Scoledario – Skins), comes out of the elevator, along with a note saying “she’s the last one”.  Right before Teresa loses consciousness, she looks right at Thomas and breathes out his name, making everybody, nobody more than Gally (Will Poulter – The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader), doubt Thomas’s identity.

THE GOOD:

1. The brisk pacing.  Unlike most young adult novel adaptations, The Maze Runner does away with the endless expositions and instead cuts right straight to the juicy stuff.  Sure, there was still a mystery but it was introduced early on and precious time wasn’t wasted on the explanation of how things in their world worked.
2. It was pretty action-packed.  Well, I was looking for action and I definitely got it.  I was surprised, actually, at how tension-filled the movie was, considering that it’s a young adult story and everybody who’s going to die was pretty much clearly marked early on.  Kudos to the director for pulling that off nicely.  It’s been a long time since a book’s tension and feel has been translated well cinematically.
   
3. The American accents.  I still don’t know how they train these actors to do this, it’s just mind boggling to me (mostly because the Hollywood American bred actors can’t even get the Southern twang sound natural).  It’s really incredible how everybody in the lead -except for Thomas, Chuck and Minho who were Americans – all had flawless American accents.
4. Thomas Brodie-Sangster!  He’s sooooooo pretty!  Kidding aside though, it’s nice to see mopey depressed kid from Love Actually play a relatively tough role.  Also, it helped loads that because he was the only one who got to keep his English accent, he automatically sounded different from everybody else.
   

THE BAD:

1. Kaye Scoledario’s small-ish role.  I wish she had more to do in the movie.  God knows she has enough talent to do anything.  It sort of feels like wasted potential.
   
2. Gally as a character.  It seemed pretty lazy to villify him, just because, when all of the points he presented were actually valid.  I can’t help but feel that his character runs pretty deep in the novel and it’s a shame that they reduced him to just two dimensions.
   
3. Chuck’s death scene was such a cliche.  Seen it, done that, I have the t-shirt.  Yawn.  Next!
4. It was too dark.  I understand that they were working with CGI and whatnot, but in the night time sequences in the maze, I could barely see anything.  Very reminiscent of Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and come on, at this day and age, can’t they come up with anything better?

THE UGLY:

1. Did the film makers even read the book?  There’s a trivia saying that the producer had his three kids offer casting advice because they read the books.  Does that mean that he didn’t?  If that’s the case, that sort of makes sense, actually, because while the movie did a nice job focusing on the cinematic aspects of the story – the chases, the fight sequences,the actual maze running – it did a poor job at telling the actual story.  It almost felt like an afterthought to put in the clues for the huge plot twist that when the ball finally fell, very little made sense.

All in all The Maze Runner was a good movie, but a bad novel adaptation.  It had everything that a great movie needed – an exceptionally talented cast, a big budget to fund all the explosions, and a director who knew his way around building onscreen tension – but it seemed that the film makers forgot all about the story.  Unfortunately, the clunky way of doing the ‘big reveal’ left me more confused than anything else and it led me to seriously question if I even want to bother with the sequel.

THE VERDICT: 6.5/10

*All photos are lifted from the film’s IMDB page.