The women around him are much more interesting-there’s Teresa (Kaya Scodelario), a steely former ally who is now back in the WCKD fold hunting for a cure, and there’s Brenda (Rosa Salazar), a spirited resistance fighter who amounts to the Han Solo of the series, equal parts spunky and sarcastic. Three movies in, Thomas remains an irritatingly blank slate, a generic hero-type for viewers to project themselves onto. So as Thomas and his friends attempt to break into WCKD headquarters in The Death Cure to get to the bottom to things once and for all, ethical gray areas abound. WCKD is a nasty bunch, doing its creepy social experiments on teens, but its goals-trying to cure a global disease-are noble, even if its means are anything but. Unlike The Hunger Games or Divergent, a monstrous autocracy is not responsible for all the world’s ills. One of the appeals of the world of The Maze Runner, based on books by James Dashner and brought to the big screen by the director Wes Ball, is that the dystopia is not entirely man-made. But if you’re looking for a tale of morally ambiguous teen triumph, you could certainly do worse. It’s also not quite as inventive with its set pieces as The Scorch Trials, which used its apocalyptic environments in surprising ways. At a hefty two hours and 22 minutes long, The Death Cure isn’t quite as propulsive as its predecessors-like any franchise finale, it has a lot of wrapping up to do.
Now that you’re all caught up, we can delve into The Death Cure, which has arrived three years later, after O’Brien suffered a severe injury on set that delayed production. The film saw Thomas and his pals try to escape WCKD and ally with resistance fighters led by Jorge (Giancarlo Esposito). Despite being the second entry in a mid-budget young-adult trilogy, The Scorch Trials was a surprisingly good piece of cinema, a high-octane, two-hour chase scene through deserts, ruined cities, and eerie laboratories. The real world outside the maze was an Earth ruined by a solar flare, crawling with mutants (called “Cranks”) infected by the so-called Flare virus and governed by WCKD, a bunch of finely coiffed scientists who wear white smocks (never a good sign). In the second film, 2015’s The Scorch Trials, things got appreciably bonkers. It turned out (spoiler alert) that the maze was a gigantic science experiment run by WCKD, a company searching for the cure to a world-ending plague. The protagonist Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) was dumped into the labyrinth without his memory, and bonded with fellow “runners” like Minho (Ki Hong Lee) and Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) as they tried to solve the mystery of their giant prison and did battle with horrifying techno-organic monsters.
The first Maze Runner, released in 2014, was set entirely within-you might want to sit down for this-a huge maze, populated by a coterie of athletic young male amnesiacs.
Plucky kids defying their futuristic corporate overlords might be yesterday’s news, but there’s one last maze for our heroes to solve.ĭear Therapist: My Adult Daughter Thinks I Was an Awful Parent Lori Gottlieb But in 2018, The Maze Runner seems almost charmingly outdated, a veritable throwback in today’s accelerated Hollywood climate.
#The maze runner series
We’re only six years removed from the release of the first entry in The Hunger Games, the film franchise based on a series of dystopian young-adult books that inspired a slew of Hollywood imitators-including the Divergent movies and the spiffed-up take on Lois Lowry’s The Giver. As its final edition, The Death Cure, rolls into theaters, it’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer amount of content packed into The Maze Runner trilogy, if by nothing else. There’s a little bit of something for everyone-a wicked corporation (that’s conveniently named “WCKD”) a post-apocalyptic society choked with hordes of roving zombies a futuristic city housing the elite a love triangle and a cornucopia of middle-aged character actors surrounding our teenaged heroes. As young-adult franchises go, The Maze Runner has always had a grab-bag, bargain-bin quality to it.
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