As the second in The Maze Runner series, The Scorch Trials is the latest in teen-craze-faze film adaptations to come to our screens. First there was Harry Potter, then Twilight… then The Hunger Games… then Divergent…
In keeping with current trends, The Maze Runner offers a post-apocalyptic setting where young people rule and old people are probably baddies – not dissimilar to its fictional book alumni from the past decade.
Given that vampires and wizards have been done to death through other film franchises, this series has zombie-like creatures whose sole purpose seems to be to provide jump scares and make sure you don’t fall asleep through a movie that provides a same-same déjà-vu feeling akin to its other novella brethren.
A key part of The Scorch Trials is the camaraderie of leading man, Thomas (Dylan O’Brien), and his mates from ‘The Glade’ (the maze through which he guided a crew of all boys and one girl in the previous film in their quest for freedom). Thomas wakes up arriving at a gigantic facility in the desert just outside a long-abandoned city that has been swallowed by a tsunami of sand. Soon, the intentions of his newly discovered saviours come into question and Thomas’s curiosity gets the better of him.
This is the catalyst for a story that finally opens up the mystery of this world – its past and what the current crop of humans plan to do to survive in a Mad Max-meets-The Last of Us environment of chaos and lots and lots and lots of running. Thomas and his crew escape the facility and make for mountains that are home to a fabled resistance. The course is treacherous to say the least, and not everyone is going to make it.
Technically this movie is hard to fault. It is well directed by Wes Ball, who did the first in the series. The lead actor, Dylan O’Brien, is great, as is his supporting cast, particularly Giancarlo Esposito (of Breaking Bad fame) who appears midway through. There are more than a handful of suspenseful and tense scenes set in the dark, only for most of these scenes to end in a deus ex machina moment where someone will come in right at the death to save the day somehow. This makes The Scorch Trials frustrating to watch and simply demonstrates lazy writing.
I have a feeling this kind of feedback is irrelevant to the audience for these films so I’ll simplify: If you liked the first movie you’ll like this, if you like the books you’ll like this, if you want to stick around for what will end up being a five-movie franchise then you’ll have to watch this.
The Scorch Trials (a.k.a. Breaking Dawn of the Maze Runner Games & the Philosophers Divergence): 6/10.
It’ll do.
