Matt Adcock’s film review: The Maze Runner

Meet 16-year-old Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) in The Maze Runner. He’s your average cute teen, but one day in the near future – for unexplained reasons – he wakes up in a strange elevator with absolutely no memory of who he is.
The Maze RunnerThe Maze Runner
The Maze Runner

The elevator delivers Thomas into a strange green clearing ringed with massive walls that form an intricate maze.

This is a place known as The Glade and it is led by a charismatic older teen chap named Alby (Aml Ameen), who marshals a group of other boys, all stuck in the heart of this ever-changing labyrinth with dreams of escape.

That’s pretty much all you need to know plot wise. From the opening set-up this is a dystopian Hunger Games- alike survival challenge based on the best-selling novel series by James Dashner.

So it’s game on to see who will survive or if any of the rag-tag bunch of boys can actually find an exit. The group include Alby’s second in command Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), ‘maze runners’ Ben (Chris Sheffield) and Minho (Ki Hong Lee) and black sheep Gally (Will Poulter).

The Maze itself has a dark side and no one has ever survived spending a night in its dark confines, which is why the boys have established a workable community. Instead they dispatch ‘runners’ to probe and map the labyrinthine maze in the hope of finding a way out. Standing between the guys and any hope of escape though are a group of semi-mechanical spider-like monsters equipped with giant scorpion-like stingers who patrol the maze.

Not long after Thomas’s arrival the first-ever girl is delivered to The Glade and apparently she recognises and has some link to Thomas. She’s named Teresa (Kaya Scodelario) and brings two syringes filled with a mysterious substance. The ‘Gladers’ find out that these syringes actually carry a cure for the spider monsters (which they call Grievers) and use one on Alby who has been stung.

The Maze Runner delivers some pretty ‘a-maze-ing’ thrills, which are worth checking out. If you like it you’ll be delighted to know that the sequel is already in production.