The Maze Runner: The Death Cure

The Maze Runner: The Death Cure

Starring Dylan O'Brien, Kaya Scodelario, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Dexter Darden

Directed by Wes Ball

The Story:
Hot on the heels of the evil corporation WCKD, Thomas (Dylan O'Brien) and his friends set out to free their friend who was captured.  As they traverse the post-apocalyptic world, they hear of a city called the Last City where WCKD is headquartered, a virtually impenetrable city surrounded on all sides by a high wall and armed to the teeth with guards and high-caliber weapons.  Inside lies the truth to everything, and possibly mankind's only hope for survival.

The Synopsis:
There's been some movies out there where I couldn't care a lick about any of the characters due to extremely poor writing and acting.  I sit through the drudgery and monotony until the film thankfully draws to a conclusion, and almost immediately wipe it from my memory bank.  While there's countless number of solo films that this has happened with, there was never a trilogy of films where I cared so little about any of the characters or their plight, until "The Maze Runner."

While director Wes Ball - who directed all three outings - surrounded his films with exciting, pulse-pounding action and flashy special effects, he doesn't spend a lot of time on character development.  The first film ran at 113 minutes, the second at 131 minutes, and the third rounds out at a staggering 142 minutes, for a grand total of 386 minutes - or well over six and a half hours.  Yet I know about as much as the film's main protagonist now than I did when he first arrived at the Glade - and that's not a whole lot.

Dylan O'Brien's Thomas is the weakest of the young adult novel-turned-film craze, very well below Queen Katniss and even a bit below Princess Tris, mostly due in fact - as said earlier - to knowing absolutely nothing about him after three films.  Where did he come from?  What was his purpose?  Why was he such a terribly ineffective leader yet somehow drew people to follow him?  Questions we never really get answered, especially the third one.  If I was in the shoes of the other kids around him, I wouldn't follow him to a Taco Bell let alone a deadly warzone.  Maybe it's due to his own hubris, which seems to be justified in the fact that his blood is seemingly teething with a cure to a strange zombie outbreak, but he's still a very ineffective leader.

Getting to his blood being the cure thing, I found that it was interesting that no one seemed to realize this fact, even after he literally used his blood to heal a person in the previous movie.  It was pretty apparent that this is his special gift to the world, but no one seemed to realize it.  Then there's the concept of this zombie outbreak in the first place - a virus that's unleashed after a solar flare strikes...I'll just stop there because I want to address everything dealing with this later, I just got off track.

Speaking of track, the opening scene of the film seems totally ripped off "Fast Five" (I think it was that one, the one where the team hijacks a train, I can't remember if it's the fourth, fifth, or sixth film, and too lazy to go to Wikipedia to look it up) as our heroes try to rescue their friend from the aforementioned train.  It was cool and fun, which seems to be the ultimate point of these films - to be cool and fun.  No need for character development, rich subtexts, or mind-twisting turns.  Just pretty people getting involved in really rad (yes, I used that word facetiously) action set pieces one right after the other.  That's why I don't care about any of the characters or, despite being three films in, even care to know their names.

While I'm on the topic of names, I still don't remember any of their names other than Thomas and Teresa, after three films.  We've seen secondary main characters die in a way that we should feel emotionally sad, but in reality we're thankful we don't have to remember another thinly-drawn character anymore.

So while the acting and the story are severely lacking, where Wes Ball goes right is in the action.  They're action blockbusters, and nothing more than that.  So if you go into these films with any thoughts of you wanting to care about the characters and see them grow and develop, then you're barking up the wrong tree.

Then there's the concept I like to call outside stimuli occurrence- or OSO for short.  It's when a moment occurs in a movie where our heroes are at their lowest, when all hope seems lost, that a random occurrence outside their control happens at the perfectly right time to turn the tide in their favor.   While this happens in certain films once or twice, in "The Death Cure" alone, I stopped counting at five.  An example of this is when the bad guys seem to have the upper hand, and it looks like Thomas is toast - and then the building is hit by a missile that Thomas never initiated nor knew anything about.  Happy coincidence, something that happens due to the fact that the writing is so poor that there couldn't be a more logical event that could've saved our heroes.

Now, after seeing all three films, I can finally list my grievances for this franchise - and there are a lot of them:
1.  If the purpose of the maze was to see which kids were immune to the disease, why did they make it so elaborate?  Couldn't they just tie them to hospital beds and administer tests that way?
2.  They said they couldn't climb the wall because the vines didn't reach all the way up, but you can clearly see they do.
3.  Kids spent three years in that maze, while the world was apparently falling apart.  Three years?  They couldn't find out if the kids were immune in a little faster way?  Time was definitely of the essence.
4.  The runners would enter the maze every day to map it out, yet they said that every night the maze changes, so how could they correctly map a maze that constantly changed?
5.  Why was Thomas put into the maze in the first place?
6.  How could a corporation make such intrinsically elaborate mazes and develop animal-robot hybrid creatures in the middle of a post apocalyptic world?
7. It's clearly obvious that Thomas is the devout Chosen One, whose blood will cure everyone of the ailment they're facing, yet it seems like that logical conclusion evaded everyone in the story until it was most convenient to the plot, even after Thomas already used his blood to heal a girl previously.
8.  For having so many supposedly "immune" kids in the maze, when they get infected they don't seem to be immune to it - pretty much a waste of time to have them there in the first place if they thought they had a cure.
9.  If a solar flare wiped out mankind, how did it also create a virus that turned people into zombies?  How did people get infected in the first place?  Solar flare = zombies?  The math doesn't seem to add up.  I was almost expecting to see vampires in the third installment.
10.  As the kids traverse the desert wasteland, they're wearing an awful lot of clothes for apparently such scorching surroundings.
11.  Even though they had kids in the maze for three years, once they escaped, it all of a sudden became of paramount importance to find the cure right away - maybe they finally realized how valuable time was, but it seemed like an awful big coincidence.

The Summary:
While it served as an edge-of-your-seat action adventure, "The Death Cure" doesn't really establish our characters as anything more than what we've come to know them as, and ultimately find ourselves not caring about them in the slightest. Yet the action was still fantastic.

The Score: B+