The Maze Runner

Last week I was invited to the Danish premiere of Wess Ball’s film “The Maze Runner” and I brought along my teenage daughter who fits right in with the young adult target audience.

Usually when I’m going to a premiere I do a bit of research in advance, but I didn’t this time and that was a huge mistake. You see, when entering the cinema, I didn’t know that “The Maze Runner” is based on the first book in the young-adult post-apocalyptic science fiction trilogy by James Dashner and thereby had no ending, and that was a great disappointment for me.

Anyway, “The Maze Runner” tells quite an exciting story about the teenage boy Thomas who wakes up in a glade with no memory of his previous life. Here he meets the Gladers, other teenage boys who arrived in The Glade in the same way as Thomas, some as long as 2 years ago, but now they live in a community where they farm the land of The Glade.  The Glade is situated in the middle of a giant maze, and some of the boys called “Runners” explore the maze during daytime in order to find a way out. However, at nightfall the maze closes its doors to The Glade and no one is able to survive a night in the maze when it is roamed by giant robot insects called The Grievers. Thomas, who has strange dreams about a mysterious organization known as W.C.K.D, wants to become a maze runner and at one point, the first and only girl turns up in The Glade and sparks off the action.

Thomas is brilliantly played by Dylan O’Brien and worth mentioning are also Aml Ameen as the Glade leader Alby, Blake Cooper as Thomas’ friend Chuck, Ki Hong Lee as the maze runner Minoh, Will Poulter as the broody Gally and especially Thomas Brodie-Sangster as the second in command Newt. They are all very talented, but the maze itself is a bit disappointing, as I had hoped for different scary creatures and things to happen and not just Grievers. Furthermore Thomas’ background and the post-apocalyptic story behind the plot is a bit flimsy and easy to figure out and frankly a bit of a disappointment when you’ve waited to get out of that maze for 113 minutes (the audience) or 2 years (The Gladers), whatever seems the longest.

I really liked “The Maze Runner” up until the last 15 minutes or so as they were very disappointing, and I felt cheated when I left the cinema. However, I do realise that it is partly my own fault for not knowing that this was a “Part 1”-film, but then again it’s the fault of the film too, as the maze was just too boring! I’m not sure if I’m going to see part 2 and 3, so for now I’m just going to give part 1 three out of three stars: ***