it is possible both to start and finish The Maze Runner: Scorch Trials not really knowing what the hell in Scorch saint is a test. Do you need a new suit?
These nimble teenagers who survived the Labyrinth, in the first film of the series James Dashner YA, have now been taken by helicopter to an underground compound, where they wake sterile captivity. As soon as they are medical examinations, we can smell a rat. What are they kept?
Never mind the fans of the books: their parents were barely alive when suspense thriller Robin Cook, Coma came out in 1977, and the film of Michael Crichton, it the following year. The first parts of the production line after importing some of that paranoia tingling, and have a simple answer to why everyone in this universe is so perfect, the polished Fitness health.
Somewhere in the bowels of the facility - that looks suspiciously like the bunker District 13 in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - teenagers are kept sedated strung on a life support, a goal that cookie-cutter hero Thomas (Dylan O'Brien ) when he gleans locked dormitory ramp of his group through some ventilation shafts. We speak of "harvesting". Later in the film, a character mentions his "appreciation changed the greater good."
Series Dashner - like most dystopian YA franchises of his ilk - has rooted Orwellian suspicion that the "greater good" might mean: general adult-speak for screwing on the underclass or younger generation . It is the rhetoric coming from meanies like Ava Paige (Patricia Clarkson), Chancellor of the organization effectively called WICKED (Catastrophe World in Killzone Experiment Department) so that we do not doubt that they are bad eggs.
Clarkson, rocker up informally in labcoats and color snow parkas, is the villain and very well the White Witch of this series, if you would not fancy his chances in a real witch-off with Tilda Swinton on bears polar.
A parade of other good cast of characters - Aidan Gillen, Giancarlo Esposito, Lili Taylor, the slightest pinch of Barry Pepper - come and go, lending their roles a quick walk if Insta-serviceable gravitas. Easily the most fun is enjoyed by Alan Tudyk, who plays a kind of impresario club called Blondie with sinister camp, kohl eyes to relish.
Much of the first hour procession takes place in a wet industrial complexes, in any of what you expect in a tube with minor nature "This place is a tomb!". Things could have easily fell and got plotty in intermediate passages, but Wes Ball returning officer has his eyes on the prize. The Scorch proves to be a wasteland desert, all that remains of a ruin, ruined city blighted by solar storms, which forced the underground civilization. The design and the effects of this apocalyptic production field are well above normal for this kind of thing, and evidence of a much higher budget than Ball had first time around.
As Thomas and his companions try to choose groped their way through security, set pieces arrive with metronomic frequency but still satisfying. Generally, when you think to yourself, "This has the makings of a decent action sequence", you get one to one half-collapsed building, the broken glass, a fatal fall below, and we are ready for a nail-biter. Conversely, when you think "Oh, he is now a tedious stop-and-chat so that actors can emote" you get that, too.
It is easy to answer these films cynically as a kind of training camp for thesps up - a chance for vulpine-featured O'Brien and his British co-stars Thomas Brodie-Sangster (Love Actually) and Kaya Scodelario (Wuthering Heights) netting a fan base and strengthen their profiles. The point is, we are also in the boot camp for the target demographic: for all their porous, mythology underexplained, these are mainly sagas about friendship, trust and sacrifice.
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