Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials runs 131 minutes. It feels longer.
The sequel to 2014’s The Maze Runner picks up seconds after the first film ends — Thomas and the surviving Gladers have just escaped the maze, and WCKD wants them back. Wes Ball returns to direct. T. S. Nowlin wrote the screenplay, adapting James Dashner’s 2010 novel, the second book in The Maze Runner series. 20th Century Fox released it in the United States on September 18, 2015, in 2D and premium large-format theaters, after a rollout in select international territories that began September 9 in 2D, 3D, 4DX and Barco Escape.
The tagline promises “The maze was just the beginning.” The film treats that as a threat, and it delivers on it — just not in the way the material needs.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
Janson’s facility and the lie of the haven
The Gladers are brought to a facility run by Mr. Janson, played by Aidan Gillen. He tells them it is a haven, a shelter from the Cranks — humans infected and driven mad by the Flare virus. While they recover, the group learns their maze was not the only one built. Other young survivors from separate trials are there too.
Thomas does not trust Janson. He teams with Aris, a survivor from a different maze and the first to arrive at the facility, to look around. What he finds: Ava Paige is still alive and running WCKD’s operations, and Janson works for her. Thomas overhears them discussing experiments on Immunes — survivors of the trials who are naturally resistant to the Flare — and an active search for the Right Arm resistance group in the mountains.
Patricia Clarkson’s Ava Paige was a voice and a face in the first film. Here she is the machinery behind the machinery. It is the right promotion for the story and the wrong one for the movie, because the film never gives her enough to do with it.
The escape, Teresa, and the Scorch
Thomas and the Gladers rescue Teresa, held separately, and break out into the Scorch — the desolate outside world the film is named for. Janson sends WCKD soldiers after them.
This is where The Scorch Trials should find its shape. A chase across ruined country, a smaller group, a clear enemy. Instead the film keeps adding. The group shelters in an abandoned shopping mall. A horde of Cranks attacks. They barely get out. Winston is scratched and infected. By morning his symptoms have worsened, and the group lets him shoot himself before the virus takes him.
That death is the film’s one honest scene. It is also the only time the movie slows down enough to let a loss land.
What the cast is given, and what it is not
Dylan O’Brien carries Thomas again, and he is the reason the film stays watchable. Kaya Scodelario returns as Teresa, Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Newt, Ki Hong Lee as Minho, Dexter Darden as Frypan, Alexander Flores as Winston.
The new supporting cast is where the film spends its ambition. Giancarlo Esposito plays Jorge. Rosa Salazar plays Brenda. Aidan Gillen plays Janson, also known as Rat-Man. Barry Pepper plays Vince, described in the production notes as “a survivalist who is one of the last remaining soldiers of a legendary unit called the Right Arm.” Nathalie Emmanuel plays Harriet, co-leader of Group B, with Katherine McNamara cast as the other co-leader. Lili Taylor plays Mary Cooper, “a doctor who helps Thomas and the Gladers.”
That is a lot of names for a film that gives most of them a scene and a half. Gillen is the clearest waste. He is a performer built for menace and ambiguity, and Janson is written as a man who is simply lying. There is no game being played, only a reveal waiting to happen.
Albuquerque, the schedule, and the shape of the thing
Filming began in Albuquerque, New Mexico on October 27, 2014, and officially concluded on January 27, 2015. That is three months for a film that moves through a facility, a desert, a ruined city, a shopping mall, a lightning storm and a mountain resistance camp.
It shows. The Scorch is a setting the film keeps describing and rarely uses. The obstacles arrive as set pieces rather than as a world. A lightning storm is a sequence. The Cranks are a sequence. The mall is a sequence. Nothing accumulates.
The maze was just the beginning.
The tagline is doing the work the screenplay should be doing. It tells you the first film was a prologue. The second film has to be a story. It is not — it is a bridge, and bridges are the least interesting thing a franchise can build.
The problem with a middle chapter
The Scorch Trials has a structural problem it never solves. The first film had a premise: a maze, a way out, a question. The third film, by definition, has a destination. The second film has a hallway.
Thomas spends the movie learning things. WCKD is still operating. Ava Paige is alive. The trials were never only about the maze. The Right Arm exists. Each of these is a fact the audience needs for the next film. None of them is a decision Thomas makes.
The result is a film where the hero is repeatedly told what is happening to him. He runs, he is captured, he escapes, he runs again. The escape from Janson’s facility is the film’s best sequence because it is the one time Thomas acts on what he knows instead of reacting to what he is told.
The film also cannot decide how much of the outside world it wants to show. The Scorch is a name, a color palette and a weather event. The novel’s desert crossing does not survive the trip to the screen. What replaces it is a series of rooms with sand between them.
What holds
Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials is not a disaster. Ball can stage a chase. O’Brien can hold a close-up. The Winston sequence is genuinely upsetting, and the film earns it by keeping it small. The Cranks work as a physical threat in a way the WCKD soldiers never do, because the soldiers are only ever a gun pointed at a teenager.
But the film’s ambitions and its execution are far apart. It wants to open up a world and it mostly opens up a cast list. It wants to build a villain and it builds a paperwork trail. It wants the Scorch to mean something and it means a desert.
Published critical scores put the film at 4.3 out of 10, with a Metacritic mark of 43 out of 100.
What those numbers miss is the specific failure. The Scorch Trials does not fall apart because it is dark or because it is long. It falls apart because it never gives Thomas a choice that costs him anything. He escapes Janson’s facility, and the film moves on. He escapes the mall, and Winston pays for it. He reaches safety, and the film ends on a new threat it has not earned. A sequel can survive a bad script. It cannot survive a hero who is only ever the last person to hear the news.
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