Review of Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015) by Michael M — 09 Feb 2016

The First Maze Runner movie I actually liked. It wasn't great, but for what it was it was a lot of fun. It was however a movie where the more you learned about its world the less fun it was. The ending left me with the feeling "well, I guess that works, but they better explain it more in the sequel". Well, no such luck. Not really anyway. This world makes very little sense. If the world has turned to shit how can they build these giant mazes? Why are the mazes the best way to test these kids? Why do they really need to test these kids? It feels like the maze plot was created first and then a world was created around them existing, but the world just doesn't work. As a solo entry, it might have been fine, but if you're going to expand that world it just starts to fall apart. That's the biggest problem with The Scorch Trials, the more you think about it the less sense it makes. Beyond that the story just isn't that great overall. There's a very specific formula: they run from something, stop and talk, run again, talk again, rinse and repeat. Yeah I know this is a pretty standard movie formula when you really think about it, but they could at least do a better job of hiding the formula. Beyond that since the world doesn't make much sense there just isn't a whole lot of tension, because I never fully understood why anything was happening.

Okay, now that all that's out of the way, the good. Because there is some good in this movie, enough to give it a moderate recommendation. If you really just accept that this world doesn't make much sense, and let yourself get lost in the chase, there is fun to be had here. There's a very steady pace to the film, all the actors to a fine job, and it just looks great. Both of these Maze Runner films look gorgeous and have fantastic directing, that's really their strongest suit. Yeah we've seen a million of these apocalyptic worlds by now, but hey, as far as those worlds go this one still looks pretty good. Even though the world doesn't make sense and that ruins some sense of tension there are still tense scenes in the movie. There are these don't-call-them-zombies creatures running around the world, so when characters are being chased by them it is tense. It's base-level tension, but tension nonetheless. Even though a few of these action scenes rip moments from other movies (there's a standing-on-glass scene taken straight from The Lost World) they do still work.

The Scorch Trials is not a great movie, and definitely not as good as the first movie. The first movie's greatest strength was its simplicity, this one overcomplicates things. Even so, I still found myself generally having a good time with it even if it was on a guilty pleasure level. The movie is just fun enough. There's better stuff out there sure, but it's still fun.