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.