Review: Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
Containing no mazes and very little scorch, this sequel to last year's The Maze Runner is a fitfully serviceable but generally dispiriting slog. Featuring plenty of running, the film is remarkable for its lack of narrative momentum and a certain seeping sedation despite all its urgently executed goings-oin.
Picking up minutes after the first film ended, Thomas (Dylan O'Brien) and his fellow Gladers, newly escaped from the experimental world of mazes and monster machines designed by the mysterious WKCD organisation, are herded into a fortified outpost run by Janson (Aiden Gillen). There they learn that theirs was not the only maze and that they are not the only survivors. Janson provides them all with food and temporary shelter, the compound serving as a halfway home before they begin their new lives in a supposedly better world.
Thomas senses something amiss, his suspicions confirmed when one of the other boys, Aris (Jacob Lofland), sneaks into his bunk and leads him through the air vents to a restricted section. Thomas discovers that Janson is in cahoots with Ava Paige (Patricia Clarkson), WCKD's pristinely garbed leader. It seems the teenagers are not being prepped for their new lives, but rather strung up in a laboratory to be drained of their invaluable immunity fluids. (Remember that the Gladers were found to be unaffected by "the flare," a zombie-like virus that has allegedly overtaken much of the population.)
Thomas stages a daring escape and the gang find themselves out in the Scorch, a vast expanse of desert they hope to survive in order to reach the mountains where a resistance group called the Right Hand is rumoured to dwell. Along the way, they encounter a vicious zombie horde called the "Cranks," lose one of their brethren, find out that they may not be as immune as they believed, and cross paths with Jorge (Giancarlo Esposito) and his surrogate daughter Brenda (Rosa Salazar), who may lead them to the Right Hand or sell them back to WCKD for a price.
Oh, and there's running, lots of running. In case the characters decide to break for expository purposes, Thomas is on hand to shout at them to keep moving, take cover, and get out of wherever they all happen to be at the time. Screenwriter T.S. Nowlin, who apparently has made significant changes to the source material, peppers the screenplay with variations of the same question - What are we doing here? What the hell is this? What's happening? What's going on? What? - and offers asinine answers that purport to clarify whilst simultaneously deepening the mystery of the overall story.
The actors function as little more than window dressing, which means the emotional stakes are pretty non-existent. Production design is so derivative that it becomes almost shamelessly plagiaristic. Its crumbled cityscape, in particular, is so straight out of The Divergent Series: Insurgent that one half-expects to be told that all of the events were merely part of one of Tris Prior's simulations.
Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
Directed by: Wes Ball
Written by: T.S. Nowling; adapted from the novel by James Dashner
Starring: Dylan O'Brien, Kaya Scodelario, Patricia Clarkson, Aiden Gillen, Giancarlo Esposito, Rosa Salazar, Barry Pepper, Lili Taylor, Alan Tudyk, Ki Hong Lee, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Dexter Darden, Alexander Flores, Jacob Lofland
