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Director: Wes Bell

Writers: T.S. Nowlin (screenplay), James Dashner (novel)

Runtime: 131 min

Main Cast:

• Dylan O'Brien as Thomas
• Ki Hong Lee as Minho
• Kaya Scodelario as Teresa
• Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Newt

Review: by Marie

With being extremely happy with the first Maze Runner movie this put me in just the right mood to see the second one.  The first Maze Runner movie gave off a bit of curiosity by leaving its characters and its audience completely in the dark about why anything is happening, and what any of it could possibly mean. What I have noticed is that the films so far make some rather significant changes to the basic plot of the book, meaning those who did read it will be almost as confused as those who did not. The Scorch Trials brought a little more insight to some of what happened in the first movie but in my taste not enough.

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“The Scorch Trials” picks up minutes after the first film ended, as protagonist Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) and his band of fellow teenage “Gladers” are transported by helicopter to a remote fortified outpost. The group has just escaped from a maze full of monster machines created as a test by the shadowy WCKD organization, which hopes to harness their immunity to “the flare,” a zombie-like virus that, along with an actual solar flare, has left the world barren and inhospitable.

Though not explaining how the previous film’s maze was supposed to benefit anyone, another thing not mentioned until this second movie was the organization WCKD, which apparently stands for “World Catastrophe Killzone Department,” which would actually be a terrible name for a government agency even if its acronym weren’t pronounced like “wicked.” The group is in the company of Janson (Aidan Gillen), an operative of indistinct accent who claims to be from a rival organization, and they’ve been united with others who escaped similar mazes. The promise of hot showers and cafeteria food pacifies everyone except Thomas and Aris (Jacob Lofland), a jittery, solitary type who’s been at the facility longer than anyone else. After some slivering through airshafts, the two discover that Janson is in league with WCKD head honcho Ava Paige (Patricia Clarkson), and the departed maze runners have been strung up in a laboratory, so WCKD can slowly drain them of their precious immunity fluids. The Gladers and Aris stage a daring jailbreak and escape into “the Scorch,” the sunbaked desert landscape that has overtaken the world’s cities. Taking shelter from the desert in a buried shopping mall, the group awakens a swarm of vicious zombies, called “Cranks” who chase and manage to snag one unlucky Glader.

They then learn the hard way that not all of them are immune to the contagion, and the infected member’s tearful, lonely suicide is the first of several surprisingly brutal moments here. With no other option, the group decides to head to the far-off mountains, where a mythical resistance group called the Right Hand may or may not offer sanctuary. Even with the threat of zombies and WCKD search helicopters in pursuit, the movie then becomes a little slow as they start trudging through the desert. The movie picks back up when the group of Gladers stumbles upon the tumbledown hideout of gang boss Jorge (Giancarlo Esposito) and his rifle-toting surrogate daughter, Brenda (Rosa Salazar). Apparently they are the only humans left on earth with a sense of humor.  Jorge and his other cohorts decide to string the “Gladers” upside down by their feet while they decide if they should lead the group to The Right Hand or sell them back to WCKD. Deciding against his partners, Jorge and Brenda guide the group on their journey to find The Right Hand.

What I Liked:

Though this movie had a lot of suspenseful and action-packed scenes, the  couple scenes that were most exciting for me was when Jorge plays the full song of Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight” over a loudspeaker during a firefight and in another, Thomas and Brenda take some sort of hallucinogen and stumble around a decadent post-apocalyptic rave.

What I Didn’t Like:

For an 131-minute film, “The Scorch Trials” offers virtually no character development and only hints of plot advancement, mostly just functioning to move a group of sideways motivated characters from one place to another without giving much clue where the whole thing is headed. The first “Maze Runner” managed to steal elements from both “Lord of the Flies” and “Cube” to build a halfway believable teenage hierarchy confronted with a mysterious yet tangible obstacle; here, there’s little sense of group dynamics, and the primary characters are all purely reactive, simply trudging from one horror to the next waiting for someone to tell them what’s going on.

Images Courtesy of IMDB