Warning: Spoilers ahead!
We have now embarked upon a new epoch in time. All of the trials and tribulations that had plagued us previously can now be washed away with the old era as we look towards the horizon to discover what fate has in store for us. Some of us have a renewed conviction to pursue great wealth. Others fantasize about venturing to distant and foreign lands, while others still will set out upon the most perilous and daunting path of all - that long, narrow, winding path in search of that thing we call “love”.
And by all of the above, I mean it’s a new year. Yes, 2017 is now behind us and 2018 is off to a running start. Some emphasis should be placed on “running start” here - 2018 wasted no time in becoming exciting, with a new season of Black Mirror released just days before the start of the year, the excitement generated by The Last Jedi still simmering and spilling over into January, North Korea pulling a fast one and announcing a joint Olympics march with South Korea, cryptocurrencies continuing to boom in interest and popularity (as of the time of writing this paragraph on January 18th, one Bitcoin was trading for just under $12000), and Seattle unsurprisingly submerged under a deluge of rain, all while I spend most of my time directing my philosophical attention towards the 20th century existentialists, like Camus and Sartre. Speaking of philosophy, the past few weeks have been particularly exciting for me as I finally finished that larger philosophical project I had been working on for the past several months and submitted it to a certain philosophy magazine for publication. I can’t announce or preview the piece yet as the publisher has asked that its contributors not share their work until an agreement has been made about the nature of the publication, but rest assured, at least part of it, if not all of it, will be made available on the blog once I hear back from the magazine (which may be several weeks). In the meantime, I must content myself with doing what I have traditionally done and continue to immerse myself in the world of fiction. Fortunately, another advantage that 2018 already has over 2017 is that, unlike 2017, 2018 actually has interesting movies coming out in the first few months of the year. In particular, this January sees the release of Maze Runner: The Death Cure.
I have an interesting history with the Maze Runner series. Having never heard of the books, I saw the first film on a whim several years ago at a discount theater while I was still a graduate student in California. I remember it rather vividly - I was working at a coffee shop in San Diego and actually found myself with a full weekend off of work. As I was making minimum wage at the time, going to a movie was something of a luxury for me (and given current ticket prices in Seattle, it still kind of is). Conveniently, the small town just north of San Diego where I lived had a slightly dilapidated discount cinema that screened most films after their normal theatrical run. With no obligations to work or school that weekend, and most of my closest friends having moved away to Los Angeles or Portland, I decided to spend my time off at the movies. For less than $5, I was able to see two movies, one on each day off. I can’t seem to remember what the first film was (perhaps that’s a testament to its quality), but the second film was definitely The Maze Runner. I remember finding it rather enjoyable, something a little different than the typical reboot or other run-of-the-mill science fiction film that Hollywood seems to be continually spitting out of the assembly line. Fast forward to 2015. Having completed my master’s degree early that summer, I suddenly found myself with a huge weight lifted off of my shoulders and an eerie amount of free time on my hands. It’s at that moment that I started putting fingers to keyboard and jotting down my assessments of the various films I was seeing, as well as chronicle my continued explorations in philosophy. It is thus that the blog was born. And not long after conceiving of the blog, I found myself in yet another weird transition period as I had been offered a job in Seattle and moved up here late that summer having never actually been to Washington state before. I wound up living in a small micro-studio, roughly 100 square feet, with little more than a laptop, a desktop, a handful of books and clothes, little knowledge of the city, and a blog that nobody was reading. Naturally, one of the first things I did after arriving in Seattle was take note of where all of the movie theaters are in the city. And it was during my research of movie theaters that I found out that there was a second installment in the Maze Runner series, The Scorch Trials. The Scorch Trials was the first film I saw after arriving in Seattle in 2015, a small means of coping with the still fresh chaos of having moved across the country. And, as can be imagined, it is also one of my earliest reviews after moving here (for those curious, it can be found under the September 2015 tab of the blog).
Now here we are in 2018 with the final installment of the Maze Runner series, The Death Cure. Based on the books written by James Dashner, the Maze Runner series is yet another example of young adult science fiction/fantasy turned into a hit-or-miss film series, much in the same vein as The Hunger Games, Twilight, or The 5th Wave. “Hit-or-miss” is very appropriate - while I was never particularly interested in either the books or the films, I certainly can’t deny that, say, The Hunger Games has a very sizable following, or that I found the Harry Potter books wildly exciting as a child. At the same time, it is also no secret that I thought The 5th Wave was one of the worst films of 2016, and definitely the worst film I’ve seen in a long time (a point that I have made many times over the past two years), and that I have yet to meet a single person that disagrees with me. The Maze Runner series lies somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, not nearly as laughably bad as The 5th Wave, but certainly not as memorable as the Harry Potter novels. At the very least, it has me continually coming back to the films, so we can at least say it is successful in this regard. But, much to my dismay, The Death Cure continues the downward trend that I began to notice with The Scorch Trials. It was just predictable and cliché, and lacked the same kind of science fiction vision that the original Maze Runner had. It many ways, it epitomizes many of the things that turn me off to young adult fiction, such as an unbelievable macho hunk of a protagonist and a linear, streamlined plot that must always clearly establish at the outset who the good guys and the bad guys are, while at the same time being largely incoherent in terms of which theme it would like to explore.
For many of my film reviews, I typically list the pros of a movie before discussing its cons, but, in this case, I think diving straight into the cons is warranted, since many of The Death Cure’s mistakes occur at the most rudimentary levels. My biggest gripe with the film would need an overview of the series as a whole, for example. The first Maze Runner film presented us with a group of adolescent boys with no recollection of who they are or where they came from having to essentially build a functioning community from the ground up while trapped in a massive labyrinth that, for them, seemed to expand the entire world, like rats in a laboratory. In other words, the narrative immediately opens up with questions that don’t have a clear answer or explanation, forcing the audience to pay attention to what is happening in order to try and fill in the blanks. What is perhaps even more intriguing about this narrative structure is that, instead of dwelling on these unanswered questions, the film then focuses on the boiling antagonism between those that desire to try and escape the maze, thus risking the overall safety of the entire group, and those that would rather remain in the security of their semi-utopian captivity. The whole thing had this very Lord of the Flies feel to it, further complicated when a lone female is dropped into maze with a bunch of young men to do whatever they desire with. It was up to the audience to pay attention and piece together the relevant backstory from the clues that were occasionally dropped here and there.
Now, fast forward to The Death Cure. We open up with a big action car chase sequence, complete with bullets, explosions, fast cars, masked henchmen that can’t aim, and an extremely complicated train robbery plot that somehow seems to go perfectly in the favor of the heroes. Indeed, we have landed a far cry away from where the series initially started. For a series called The Maze Runner, The Death Cure was certainly lacking in the maze department (this same point could also be said of The Scorch Trials). For those of you may have perhaps missed the films, or may not have been completely paying attention, allow me to fill you in on how we got from the maze to generic-action-car-chase. It turns out that the events of the first film were orchestrated by an evil organization called WCKD (apparently, they couldn’t afford to put vowels in their name), who dropped the boys into the maze in order to expose them to extremely stressful situations, thus cultivating the genetic expression of their immunity to a disease called “The Flare” that has nearly wiped out the entire human race, which WCKD aims to eventually harvest from them in order to develop a cure. After escaping from the maze at the end of the first film, our group of survivors is then exposed to what the outside world actually looks like - a giant, barren, desolate wasteland referred to as “The Scorch” - as they try to elude re-capture by WCKD in The Scorch Trials. Then, after some of them are unfortunately captured again at the end of the second film, The Death Cure sees our main protagonist, Thomas, leading a small resistance group against WCKD on a daring mission to rescue them in a plot that takes us from the post-apocalyptic, Mad Max-esque wastelands of The Scorch to the cyberpunk, Tron-esque spires of the Last City in an extremely jarring landscape shift.
It’s almost as if The Death Cure is trying too hard to be a good science fiction film. At times, it borders on the post-apocalyptic and nihilistic as Thomas and crew brave the perilous dangers of The Scorch and its disease-ridden inhabitants, while at other times it flirts with the futuristic and visionary as they infiltrate the well-illuminated and colorful Last City. The problem with this is that it tries to explore so many sci-fi sub-genres that it doesn’t really devote enough attention to any of them: The Death Cure doesn’t explore the dangers of unfettered scientific progress that you find in post-apocalyptic fiction, nor does it seem to make the case for pursuing the fruits of relentless devotion to advanced technology that you find in high sci-fi. It doesn’t even seem to address the antagonism between these two perspectives on scientific progress by focusing on the juxtaposition of these conflicting landscapes - it would have been interesting to explore the daily life, the pros and cons, of those living in The Scorch and those living in the Last City and allowing the audience to draw conclusions on scientific progress based on that, but The Death Cure doesn’t do that. The closest we come to seeing something like this is towards the end of the film when a group of fanatics from The Scorch essentially go full jihad and force their way into the Last City, but this amounts to background noise against the “clearly” more important narrative of Thomas being the hero.
Speaking of our heroes in this story, a point that I noticed in The Scorch Trials, and a point that doesn’t fail to rear its ugly head here, is that Thomas is just full of bad ideas, bad ideas that everyone seems to eagerly follow. In everyday, normal life, reality is very good at punishing those who consistently pursue bad ideas, even killing off those who do something egregiously bone-headed. In the Maze Runner universe, however, there appears to be some kind of magical luck fairy serving as a guardian angel to Thomas and crew, an invisible hand reaching down from the high heavens to shield them from bullets and orchestrate events such that they always seem to go in favor of our protagonists, no matter how ridiculously complicated they are. The aforementioned car-chase-train-robbery opening sequence is a great example of this. In a nutshell, this involved Thomas and a number of other freedom fighters in Mad Max-style vehicles pulling up next to a speeding WCKD train transporting a score of captured children, sneaking on board, using C4 to detach the transportation car from the engine, and fighting off a dozen armored WCKD commandos with automatic rifles while another group of rebels manages to hijack a WCKD military helicopter, fly it to the stranded transportation car, secure it with chains, and fly away with it. And it works - every detail of this plan works perfectly in the favor of our heroes. The jerry-rigged C4 adequately detonates, none of the teenagers manage to be shot by trained commandos with rifles while Thomas single-handedly downs a number of WCKD soldiers with a 9mm pistol, the rest of the group manage to successfully commandeer a WCKD helicopter and fly it to the train in a matter of minutes without any difficulties, and they are able to secure an entire train car to the helicopter and fly away without any of the chains breaking and before they are overrun by WCKD. Such unbelievable luck is a recurring theme throughout The Death Cure. In another scene, after Thomas and Newt rescue Minho from the WCKD headquarters in the Last City and try to escape, WCKD’s head of security, Janson, has them cornered in a room on what appears to be the 20th floor of the WCKD building, where the only way out is covered by Janseon’s armed henchmen. How do our daring heroes get out of this one? They jump out the window. Literally. They fall down an entire skyscraper and land in a pond just outside of the building in the main quad area (there just conveniently happened to be a pond there beneath the exact window the room the boys were trapped in). And they are perfectly fine - they just get up and walk it off like it was nothing. Of course, as Janson had the building on lockdown, more armed commandos were situated right there at the entrance to the building next to the pond and proceed to surround Thomas, Newt, and Minho. But never fear! Since any kind of misfortune befalling our heroes would go against the very predictable narrative structure, the luck fairy stepped in and made it so that their buddy Gally just happened to be masquerading as one of the commandos that just happened to be right outside the building at the exact moment Thomas and crew fell into the pond from the 20th floor of a skyscraper and conveniently emerged unscathed. Gally then proceeds to single-handedly take out the battalion of commandos surrounding Thomas, Newt, and Minho, and help them continue their escape from the city. It's all just so absurd, and it makes it difficult to worry about our protagonists when we are given the impression that everything will always go their way.
Is there anything that The Death Cure does well? Well, strangely, the acting and characters weren’t all that bad. Thomas Brodie-Sangster’s performance as Newt was memorable, and I must admit that I did actually feel the dramatic effect and weight of the situation when Newt died. He was the one voice of reason amongst a growing cadre of characters ready to follow Thomas into whatever silly situation he managed to get himself into (kind of - there was one scene early on where Newt anticipates Thomas’ bad idea, and instead of trying to stop him, packs his bags to tag along). Aidan Gillen’s portrayal of Janson was also very interesting, as Janson always seemed to have this bemused grin or smirk on his face, even during those scenes where he was supposed to be angrily emptying clips of bullets at Thomas and crew or when the Last City comes under attack from the refugees of The Scorch. I thought it added this kind of loathsome quality to the character, making one want to punch him in the face more than anything else. Even many lesser known actors performed well in their roles. Ki Hong Lee, for example, had to cover a large spectrum of expressions as Minho, going from situations of extreme pain and catatonia while under torture by WCKD to bouts of hope and action after being rescued by Thomas. Ironically, it was Dylan O’Brien’s portrayal of Thomas that was kind of underwhelming, as the only attitude he seemed to know throughout the entire series was one of the macho-tough-hero archetype.
In short, you’re not missing anything if you pass on Maze Runner: The Death Cure. Those of you who haven’t even seen the first two entries in the Maze Runner series likely won’t even understand many of the references that are made in the film (i.e. “The Flare” or “The Scorch”), nor does it do justice to the puzzle that was the first Maze Runner. Instead, it devolves into another generic, run-of-the-mill sci-if action cliché. Luckily for the series, it presumably ends here, as it appears as if other media outlets have picked up on the same slow degradation of the series that I have pointed out here. It's a pity because I genuinely found the first Maze Runner film pretty engaging, with a narrative that seemed to take the most intriguing elements of Lord of the Flies and apply them to a group of kids that were essentially lab rats to a faceless antagonist. I will say, however, that The Death Cure was at least entertaining, if only to a really shallow degree. And this is actually an improvement over previous years - The Death Cure is actually far better than The 5th Wave from 2016, and 2017 didn’t even have any interesting movies at all until March. In that regard, The Death Cure at least deserves an A for effort.
