We're All Trying To Escape A Maze, Kid

Visiting Alex this weekend, that's been fun. Fantastic weather, attended the wedding of a couple of friends of his. Quite the shindig, they even had fireworks for it, and a taco bar. Although I was mortified when I accidentally knocked the ladle for the beans into said beans. Sorry everyone who wanted beans without getting bean juice on your fingers!

We were trying to watch some TV, but Comedy Central was showing a bunch of awful roasts, so we wound up watching The Maze Runner. These kids, in this big open field in the middle of this shifting maze full of bio-mechanical spider-things that try to kill them, and none of them remember anything about themselves except their names. Always curious about these processes that remove all of someone's memories about themselves, but they still remember how to walk, talk, eat, farm, function with other people. Very impressive selective memory repression.

Then the Special Boy - Thomas - gets sent up (every month a new amnesiac kid gets sent into the glade from an underground elevator, along with a bunch of supplies), and he wants to break all the rules the kids have established to keep order. Things seem to change in response to his presence or his choices, which leads to a lot of scared an stupid decisions, and Thomas keeps pushing to do more things they'd decided not to do, and nothing is really resolved by the end of the first movie, because the books are a series I guess.

There's one kid who just doesn't like Thomas, the Token Unbeliever, and he could almost have a point, but he's such a moron about things. Someone points out Thomas saved Alby, the leader of the group, and Token Unbeliever retorts, "did he?" Well, seeing as Alby was infected, and Minho, who was dragging him back, wasn't going to make it before the gates closed for the night, and so Thomas ran into the maze and helped keep them both safe until daylight, yes, he did save him. It seems like there were arguments to be made that Thomas' actions were ill-advised. He really has no idea what's going on for a good chunk of the film, but keeps insisting people should do what he wants, or at least let him do what he wants. Which, if you're trying to maintain some sort of society, is a dangerous precedent, since then everyone starts wondering why they can't just do whatever. The counter being, it isn't going to be a society, because they can't stay there. People do seem to die a lot when he's around, though I'm not clear on what their casualty rate was like before that. It just felt like there were good objections to make, but they weren't being made.

Lotta people and things in this movie either getting crushed by enormous stone pillars, or nearly getting crushed. If you really enjoyed the final battle at the end of the first Terminator movie, or that sequence with the slowly lowering ceiling in Temple of Doom, this movie's for you. There were parts of the maze - mostly the scene with Thomas getting chased through it at night - that reminded me of a dungeon from Ocarina of Time. Probably because of all the climbing on big stone blocks, leaping across gaps, and climbing on foliage. That chase was actually pretty well done, although it made the spider-thing look kind of incompetent compared to how fearfully the kids spoke of it. Also, they keep trying to push the spiders into chasms, but it's a spider-thing, it can climb walls. You kids know this, you've seen them do it.

I'm going to assume at least some of the stuff they're eventually told about a virus as a result of the Sun overheating the world is nonsense, but even so, if the world is actually going to hell, why is this group spending a ludicrous amount of money on essentially a giant hamster wheel for teens? How much money did it cost to build this huge complex, with walls hundreds of feet high, that can move and shift thanks to gear systems? There's a big, fertile field in the center, but the area around the maze is a complete desert wasteland, like the area around Thunderdome. Maybe devote some resources to restoring more places on the planet to that level of productivity. How much did engineering the fucking spiders cost?

Not that I would be surprised that wealthy companies and/or governments would do terrible things to teens for their own benefit. That's kind of what people do, punt on problems, and let the next generation take the hit. This just seems like such a stupid way of going about it. Build an undersea paradise, blast off in search of a more habitable planet (if the Sun's heated up, what's happening on Mars right now?) I'd expect this W.C.K.D. group to take a cheaper, more direct route to saving their own necks. As it is, it's hard to see what they're actually learning from all this.