On Sept. 19, the movie adaptation of the book The Maze Runner, by James Dashner, made its way into theaters. Being a fan of the entire Maze Runner series, I was thoroughly entertained by the film, despite several significant differences between the book and the movie.
This could have been because I got to spend an hour and fifty three minutes watching Dylan O’Brien’s face on the big screen, which was the best part I might add.
The first installment of The Maze Runner is about a community of teenage boys living together in “The Glade,” which is located in the middle of a maze that has been inescapable for three years, the amount of time the Gladers have lived there.
Each month, an elevator type box is sent up into the Glade containing supplies from their “captors,” an organization named W.C.K.D, WICKED in the book, and a new member of the community, a new Glader.
These Gladers are sent up in the box with absolutely no memory of how they got there or their previous lives, only their names. Both the book and the movie start when a new “Greenie” named Thomas arrives in the box.
Thomas isn’t like other Gladers, he has flashbacks of memories. Things get even more weird when a girl is sent up, the first and only girl the Glade has ever seen, named Teresa.
After Teresa arrives, everything changes; Grievers start coming out during the day and the Gladers turn on eachother. With the leadership of Thomas, the Gladers must find a way out of The Maze, or die trying.
The missing detail that bothered me the most would have to be the absence of Thomas and Teresa’s telepathic communication, which is very important throughout the series. At the same time, I understand that this would be hard to convey in a movie without coming across as cheesy.
And although I pictured Gally as a bit more dark and menacing than the actor who played him, Will Poulter, the rest of the cast was spot on.
What the movie was lacking in textual accuracy, it made up for in theatricality and special effects. It’s not easy to turn eight acres in Baton Rouge, LA into a full blown, semi-automated maze crawling with Grievers, an organic-machine hybrid that is responsible for the death of many Gladers.
If you’re into dystopian societies and teenage casts without the romance, (if you stick around it’ll show up, trust me) then you definitely need to check this movie, and the book it was based off of, out.
