A young man (Dylan O’Brien) is inexplicably transported, by forces unknown, to a strange location — a grassy enclosure called the Glade, surrounded by a concrete fortress called the Maze.
Our protagonist doesn’t remember anything, not even his name. He finds himself with a bunch of teenage boys with similar back stories — they have no idea who they are or what they are doing in the Glade.
The newbie soon recalls his name — Thomas — but continues to have no memories to explain what led him to this point. Like the backgrounds of its characters,
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Even the computer enhancements are kept to the minimum, despite first-time director Wes Ball owning his own CGI company. A maze is a powerful visual symbol, and Ball makes the smart choice of letting the Maze hog the centre.
Some issues, however, could have been explored a bit deeper — the world of the story on a macro level, and on the micro level, the social structure within the Glade. We are only offered a shortcut explanation that the lads have fashioned a society where each has a task, whether it’s fashioning weapons or growing food. It’s a sort of sanitised version of Lord of the Flies .
At the top of the heap are the Runners, who enter the labyrinth to discover its secrets. The mysterious Maze — with walls too high to climb — offers one opening by day that changes every night. The Runners cannot stay overnight in the Maze, given the terrifying arachnidan Grievers who come out to patrol it.
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Thomas soon assimilates with the bunch of teenagers and we get to know some of them: Alby (Aml Ameen), the first arrival to the Glade, is the leader along with Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster). Minho (Ki Hong Lee) is a Runner well-versed with the Maze while the de rigeur antagonist is the bullying Gally (Will Poulter).
Gally accepts the Glade as his life and resents Thomas’ drive to change things and find a way out of the Maze. Things change even more when eventually a lone girl Teresa (Kaya Scodelario) is thrown into the all-male mix. We also get brief intimations of a shadowy organisation called WCKD led by Ava Paige (Patricia Clarkson) that may or may not be the originator of the Maze.
The film is based on the first of James Dashner’s popular fantasy novels set in some dystopian future society. Even if you did not know that, the feeling of TheMaze Runner being the first of a franchise — rather than a self-contained story — is strong.
In other words, while the big reveal at the end of the film is decent enough, it’s primarily a set-up for the next. Like rats in a maze we’ve been promised some heavy duty cheese if we stay the course and are left now with tantalizing morsels.