It’s a sturdy narrative peg, and the complications along the way are genuinely involving and piquant. In Death Cure, Thomas (Dylan O’Brien), the leader of the Gladers, makes it his top priority to save the lead maze-runner Minho (Ki Hong Lee) from becoming WCKD’s prize lab rat. The World Catastrophe Killzone Department (WCKD, pronounced “Wicked”), led by scientist Ava Paige (Patricia Clarkson), isolated young people who appeared to be immune, and she engineered the trials they faced in the Glade as part of an attempt to test and mine an enzyme that could reverse the Flare. Over the course of the first two entries, we learn that a solar flare ignited a deadly global contagion called “the Flare,” infecting most of the earth’s population with a brain-wasting disease that eventually turns its victims (the Cranks) into demented cannibals. Seen as a whole, the trilogy could be called The Malaise Runner, because in YA easy-reader terms, it has the same onion-layered quality that Edmund Wilson found in Raymond Chandler’s novels: “It is not simply a question here of a puzzle which has been put together but of a malaise conveyed to the reader, the horror of a hidden conspiracy that is continually turning up in the most varied and unlikely forms.” When he sets up, say, a riff on Butch and Sundance’s mountainside plunge, he keeps his performers from mimicking Newman and Redford and provides them with different notes of panic and comic relief. It all hangs together because the director’s aim is true.
#MAZE RUNNER: THE DEATH CURE 2018 MOVIE#
The Scorch Trials was a nonstop chase-like a Mad Max movie staged on foot.ĭeath Cure starts with a slam-bang train robbery before it segues into a number of cliffhangers in which the “cliffs” are urban canyons of glass and steel. He filled The Maze Runner with surefire boys’-adventure sights, like a pack of kids using makeshift spears to battle enormous insect-like creatures. The Last City is a poignant as well as a topical setting, because the routine traffic and commerce of a functioning Big Town are sources of wonderment to Gladers.īall’s straightforward, flexible technique and his ability to stage action appropriate to each locale have brought the franchise a refreshing variety. (The production was based in Cape Town, South Africa.) It boasts striking vertical architecture and a wall to keep out Cranks-something, naturally, that it proves unable to do.
#MAZE RUNNER: THE DEATH CURE 2018 SERIES#
Starting in a grassland called “the Glade,” filled with amnesiac boys and just one girl, and bounded by a giant concrete maze with terrifying biomechanical predators known as “Grievers,” the series has gone on to encompass eerie underground bunkers and labs with suspended bodies a la Coma, zombie-like beings known as “Cranks,” urban ruins and blinding deserts (in 2015’s Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials) and now, in Death Cure, a gleaming metropolis called, with touching literalness, “The Last City.” It’s no Emerald City, just a modern urban center. But, whatever your age, if you grew up at neighborhood theaters that held Saturday matinees, I bet you’ll be engaged by Ball’s affection for his cast and skill at using an apocalyptic premise to reframe setpieces from Westerns, wilderness movies, urban shoot-’em-ups, and previous sci-fi Armageddons like the original Planet of the Apes. The producers have targeted this franchise squarely at middle-school kids and high school underclassmen.
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Its young heroes never stop asking, “What exactly are we doing here?”-then punch through to their own tough answers. From the first film in 2014 to the current finale, Maze Runner: The Death Cure, the director, Wes Ball, has stripped Dashner’s pop myth down to its satisfying teen-rebel essence.
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Coming at the tail end of the Young Adult dystopia craze, the movie franchise based on James Dashner’s Maze Runner trilogy is like the runt of the litter that grows into a sinewy hound.