‘Maze’ harvests respect
Imaginative directorial flourishes rescue young tomb raiders from shallow grave
***THE MAZE RUNNER: SCORCH TRIALS. Directed by: Wes Ball. Starring: Dylan O’Brien, Thomas Brodie Sangster, Ki Hong Lee, Rosa Salazar, Kaya Scodelario, Jacob Lofland, Giancarlo Esposito, Aiden Gillen, Lily Taylor, Patricia Clarkson, Berry Pepper. Showing at: The Bridge, Baywest, Boardwalk, Walmer Park and Hemingways.
IT’S possible both to begin and end The Maze Runner: Scorch Trials not really knowing what in holy hell a Scorch Trial is. Would you need a new suit? Those agile teenagers who survived the Maze in the first film from James Dashner’s young adult (YA) series, have now been whisked by helicopter to an underground compound, where they wake up in sterile captivity.
As soon as they’re given medical tests, we may smell a rat. What are they being kept for? Never mind fans of the books: their parents would have been alive when Robin Cook’s suspense thriller Coma came out in 1977, and the Michael Crichton film of it the next year.
The early parts of this productionline sequel import a little of that tingling paranoia, and have a ready- made answer to why everyone in this universe is in such perfect, gym-buffed health.
Somewhere in the bowels of this facility – which looks suspiciously like the District 13 bunker in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – sedated teens are being kept strung up on life-support, for a purpose that cookie-cutter hero Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) gleans when he crawls from the locked dorm through some ventilation shafts. There is talk of “har vest”.
Later in the film, a character mentions her “evolved appreciation of the greater good”.
Dashner’s series – like most dystopian YA franchises of its ilk – has an ingrained, Orwellian suspicion of what the “greater good” might signify: generally adult-speak for screwing over the underclass or younger generation.
It’s the rhetoric coming from meanies such as Ava Paige (Patricia Clarkson), chancellor of the organisation helpfully named WICKED (World in Catastrophe: Killzone Experiment Department) so we have no doubt they’re bad eggs.
Clarkson, rocking up officiously in labcoat and snow-coloured parka, is the arch-villain and very much the White Witch of this series, though you wouldn’t fancy her chances in an actual witch-off with Tilda Swinton on those polar bears.
A parade of other good character actors – Aidan Gillen, Giancarlo Esposito, Lili Taylor, the merest pinch of Barry Pepper – come and go, lending their roles a brisk if serviceable insta-gravitas. Easily the most fun is enjoyed by Alan Tudyk, who plays some kind of club impresario called Blondie with sinister-camp, kohl-eyed relish.
Much of the first hour takes place in a procession of dank industrial sets, in any one of which you fully expect some minor character to pipe up with “This place is a tomb!”
Things could easily have sagged and got plotty in the middle passages, but returning director Wes Ball has his eyes on the prize. The Scorch turns out to be a desert wasteland, all that remains of a crumbling, ruined city blighted by solar storms, which forced civilisation underground.
The production design and effects for this apocalyptic terrain are way above par for this sort of thing, and evidence of a much higher budget than Ball had first time around.
As Thomas and his companions try to pick their way through to safety, the set pieces arrive with metronomic but still satisfying frequency.
It’s easy to respond to these films cynically as a kind of boot-camp for rising thesps – a chance for vulpine-featured O’Brien, and his British co-stars Thomas Brodie-Sangster ( Love Actually) and Kaya Scodelario ( Wuthering Heights) to net a fanbase and beef up their profiles.
But for all their porous, under-explained mythology, these are sagas about friendship, trust and sacrifice.
The film’s most affecting moment is the fate of one tag-along whom the crew must leave behind, gripping a pistol. As the gunshot rings out, Ball resists the temptation to have the others respond in teary close-up, giving us instead a beautiful long shot of them filing over a dune ridge, and solemnly halting in tandem as a mark of respect.
The pace may lurch, and the characters don’t really grow, but that kind of imaginative directorial flourish makes Scorch Trials no trial at all. – The Telegraph