Pretty disappointing and crappy movie.

I suspected a casual and fun movie with this one, maybe with some puzzles and an interesting premise. However the movie disappointed from the start.
For a adaptation from a book I sure hope this was a bad one. You get thrown into the middle of a stoy where suddenly all kinds of stuff happens. I hope this wasn't the case in the original work, because it is one of the major flaws of this movie, and could be explained as the cause of many of its other faults.

The acting was luckily pretty ok, but many of the characters don't add to the story at all and are just filling up empty screen. The sound was to cry off as well. Soundtrack was ok, but many scenes had no music and felt like a soap because of it.
I am all for being creative with sound, but this was just done badly.

Since I won't bore you with pages of irrelevant texts, like the movie does, i will just make a list of the cons and pros.

Cons:
- Paced way too fast
- No build up for a climax (the film was more of a constant climax actually)
- Not getting time to get acquainted with the characters, therefore not caring about there faith.
- Very little character development, except maybe for Gally (Will Poulter)
- Stating many things as impossible without many explanation
- Revealing the endgame in the first act of the movie with a flashback/memory which makes the whole movie unnecessary,
- Also making the whole story as predictable as a Japanese train schedule.
- Inappropriate absent of sound
- Too much unimportant characters
- Did we really need another Hunger Games movie?
- etc.

Pros:
- Nice environment
- Funny but cool looking cyborg creatures
- Doesn't need many attention to follow, so you can check your twitter or facebook feed in the meantime.

A tribe of young men seek answers in a mysterious, synthetic environment. I enjoyed the setup, and the blunt ground rules of the world itself (we're surrounded by a giant labyrinth that seals itself and shifts mechanically every sundown - don't get caught inside when it does), but the cast is perilously dry and boring, so naturally we spend way too much time getting to know them. Dylan O'Brien is particularly bad as Thomas, a savior who pushes the complacent society to break out of their strongholds and pursue a method of escape. His is a special kind of anti-charisma, blank and wooden and static... stupid handsome, like an underwear model.

Occasional jaunts into the maze itself are the real draw of this film, and clearly the most entertaining bits, but they're bafflingly few and far between. Why revel in the atmosphere when instead you could be setting up sequels with a set of fatally-flawed characters, I guess? Not that the plot is all that competent, either. Think too hard and you'll surely slip into one of the broad holes scattering its landscape.

It's a middling effort in every sense of the word. Outside of the maze, which is a nice (if brief) breath of clear air, the rest of this film's concepts and ideas have already been done many times before, by more complete rivals. Even the CG-heavy monsters don't trigger a reaction - I think I recognized them from the lower levels of hell in Doom 2, circa 1994.

Unexpectedly more interesting than I was anticipating, but also more of a let-down. There's an immense set-up and big questions asked that are payed off in the least satisfying way that only works to set up the rest of the franchise. Now, that said I am actually intrigued to know where the story goes from here because I legitimately was not even kind of expecting that the entire world that was ominously built in the first half would be completely thrown out by the end only suggesting that we'll never see that maze again lol.

But really, I think what was the most interesting about _The Maze Runner_ is how I somehow knew absolutely nothing about it. The first book came out when I was 14. I had kind of moved out of young adult fiction at that point, but I had friends that were younger than me so I'm kind of shocked that I knew literally zilch about this story. I never read a page of these books, I never even saw a trailer for these films. They only popped up on my radar when my younger cousin mentioned the films to me a few years ago and then I realized that director Wes Ball also went to my alma mater. It's kind of cool, I guess, for my involvement with these stories because it means I am going in 100% blind with actually zero expectations. To me, this is just something in the vein of _The Hunger Games_, which admittedly, wasn't my cup of tea at the time they were coming out. So to be honest, despite the incessant franchise setup I actually found myself having a pretty good time watching _The Maze Runner_.

I'll go on a tangent. I grew up with _Harry Potter_ and, like so many people in the world, they were foundational to my upbringing and my identity. They still are, to be honest. I re-read them frequently. I love them very much. But the older I get and the more I interact with young adult epics as an adult, the more I realize just **how good** those novels really are. We can go back on forth about them on a literary level and the artistic rigor of Rowling's prose, but what I mean here is the storytelling of the series. Rowling keyed into loss, tragedy, ambivalence of humanity, and evil really well, but did it all through an incredibly charming and whimsical lens. Central to this is Harry's characterization. He's a boy not unlike Thomas in how he begins his journey, but the arc that he goes through has a significantly more weighty piece of development. It's about self-worth. It's about overcoming adversity through strength of character and I've always linked Harry's struggles to my own struggles with depression. Thomas, although more charismatic from the get-go, doesn't feel like there's a whole lot for him to grow into. That's okay. It's not really about that in _The Maze Runner_, but it just makes me love the YA series of my youth that much more.

Another forgettable Game of Ender/Hunger Games/Divergent clone.

In this case, to compensate that the main characters are often women, we just make the whole cast to be men.

Just forget about this.

It was a good movie as far as it goes -- resourceful characters deprived of both freedom and their memories manage to build a society and think their way out of their bondage. The problem is that at the end, it simply stopped. No dramatic reason for ending where it does, no resolution of "why did the captors do this?" . Even in a series a movie ought to have a decent local climax -- for example, Kat and Peeta winning the Hunger Games.