Two Sides to 'The Maze Runner'

Another season, another film adaptation of a best-selling dystopian young adult novel that is not “The Hunger Games.” In Wes Ball’s “The Maze Runner,” based on the novel by James Dashner, distinction lies in believable humanity, in characters with well-meant intentions that align themselves with motivations deeper than a reductive binary. Here, it seems, a group of young people trapped in a designed and hostile environment (not “The Hunger Games”) finally understands that their chances of survival are higher if they attempt to work together more and kill each other less.

The premise manifests interestingly but recognizably: doe-eyed teenager Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) wakes up in an elevator that spits him out into a grassy clearing where he is quickly roughed up and acclimatized by the boys who arrived before him. He remembers nothing but his name, but group leader Alby (Aml Ameen) assures him that this is normal. Alby, portrayed by Ameen with a reassuring, quiet poise rather than bravado, also explains that the clearing is bordered by a circular maze that remains open to the boys during the day, but mechanically closes at night. This, Thomas learns, protects the boys from the maze-dwelling Grievers, giant robot spiders with faces that make Alien look downright cuddly. Some of the boys, officially titled “runners,” explore the maze every day, but an exit has not yet been found. Thomas, of course, immediately tries to enter said lethal maze.

Alby stops him and explains that peace amongst the boys is reliant on the group’s stability and maintenance of numbers, in one of the moments of welcome rationality that holds the film back from the edge of routine allegory. Similarly, the dynamic amongst the young, almost all-male cast is refreshingly endearing rather than immediately divided, even as Gally (Will Poulter, in an impressively nuanced performance) takes offense to Thomas’s upstart tendencies. They drink homemade brew and clap each other on the back often. They wear cargo shorts and leather-corded necklaces. They discuss group morale and social events in a dark, musty room. They’re like a fraternity, only quite racially diverse. You half-expect someone to start a game of ultimate frisbee or insist that they’re reinventing EDM with their GarageBand projects.

Individually, though, some performances falter: after her arrival (which upheaves the tenuous order of the all-male group and finally illuminates some clues about the creators of the maze), the heavily-billed Kaya Scodelario of “Skins” fame probably has about 10 minutes of total screen time as Teresa, responsible mainly for saying single words and shedding single tears. O’Brien, meanwhile, lends Thomas little in the way of sympathy, even in moments of grief or terror. The majority of his screen time is dedicated to gaping, head-clutching, wordless screaming, as well as, surprise, running.

However, that very physicality also contributes compellingly to an overall effect of heady breathlessness. The strain is visible on the faces and bodies of actors as they sprint away from Grievers, each other, or through the shifting, bladed walls of the maze; the camera skillfully follows them without attempts to deceive about their actual speed. Shots of the maze itself artfully demonstrate its complexity and dulled-metal claustrophobia, mostly shying away from revealing the maze in its entirety.

There are still some pitfalls throughout “The Maze Runner” that by now are almost canon of the genre: the supposedly amnesiac boys somehow know how electronic trackers and syringes work and can accurately intuit meaning from assortments of letters and numbers they discover in their explorations. There are cryptic video messages from mysterious authority figures. There is bogglingly brazen setup for sequels. There are even flashback dream sequences.

But on the whole, “The Maze Runner” is an intriguing version of a narrative that permeates the contemporary box office, one that doesn’t have to sacrifice an imagination of a cooperative community for the sake of sensationalist, individual heroism. When the maze’s full scope is revealed towards the end of the film, the visual effect is quite stunning: it’s really only in the close-ups that the cracks in the walls are visible.

—Staff writer Natalie T. Chang can be reached at natalie.chang@thecrimson.com.