![]() ![]() Many of the action setpieces are derivative, to be sure, with echoes of everything from Transformers: Dark of the Moon to Terminator Genisys, but they’re effective nevertheless. Meanwhile, director Wes Ball brings the right level of energy, at least to the second half. Character actors collecting paychecks in YA adaptations are nothing new a friend once called the Harry Potter series “a retirement plan for the Royal Shakespeare Company.” But they’re especially welcome in this case, because they make up for the film’s thin script and the younger actors’ mostly anonymous performances by letting their own personas fill the void. So besides the aforementioned Tudyk and Pepper, Giancarlo Esposito shows up as a wasteland pirate, and Lili Taylor as a resistance leader. (“This one’s got green aphrodisiacs, zombies on chains, and Alan Tudyk in velvet.”) As our heroes discover others out there in the Scorch, the story loosens up and starts to have fun, with admirable assists from a series of terrific character actors. ![]() We get a demented rave that would make Saturday Night Live’s Stefon proud. We get underground, rat-eating, mutant root zombies. And so, The Scorch Trials starts to peter out under the weight of its meaninglessness and sheer unoriginality.Įssentially, The Scorch Trials makes up for the humdrum YApocalypse of its first half by going a little bonkers in its second. ![]() O’Brien, who gave Thomas a likable desperation in the first film, here goes a little too often to his signature move: running with his arms flailing and his mouth wide open. There’s very little development to these characters, which is probably okay for those who remember the original film well, not so much for those of us who don’t. It’s an all-of-the-above sci-fi dystopia. (Environmental devastation? Check.) And more zombies. It’s a deadly but thoroughly predictable postapocalyptic landscape: The rivers have become deserts. They flee WCKD and head out into the Scorch, the aforementioned wasteland. (Human experimentation? Check.) Regardless, Thomas and his pals don’t want to wait to find out. Occasionally, some of the kids are rounded up by WCKD and taken away - we’re not sure where to. (Militaristic, fascist plutocrats? Check.) They’re housed in a massive complex, where they join lots of other kids there were apparently many different mazes. Then they’re whisked away by WCKD (World Catastrophe Killzone Department), the mysterious organization responsible for putting them in the maze in the first place. As the film starts, our protagonist from the first film, Thomas (Dylan O’Brien), and his companions Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), Minho (Ki Hong Lee), Frypan (Dexter Darden), Winston (Alexander Flores), and Teresa (Kaya Scodelario, the lone girl in their crew), get a brief glimpse of the wasteland that the Earth has become. Now the first of those sequels is here, and for much of its first half, The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials fulfills all of our worst fears about where this story would go (especially for those of us who haven’t read the original James Dashner YA novels). The stage was set for what would surely be a bunch of world-building, overinsistent sequels with little of the lean charm of the original. At the end of the film, our heroes stepped out into a fiery apocalypse, with futuristic soldiers and helicopters and whatnot all around the place. But then The Maze Runner went and did something stupid: It let them escape from the maze. In it, a group of amnesiac young men were trapped in an enclosed glade, with a mysterious and deadly maze as their sole means of escape - an intriguing dysbropia with an existential spin. Last year’s The Maze Runner was a pleasant surprise - a young-adult adaptation that refused to overexplain itself, letting our uncertainty about its bewildering futuristic world mirror the characters’ own. ![]()
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