The Last Dystopian Teen Film
There was a period in what felt like ages ago now where everything in the young adult genre was being made. Anything that was a book about a world where one thing was different or a dystopian styled future was put on the big screen for all of it’s fans to see. The big three were The Hunger Games, Divergent and Maze Runner and then there was all of the other ones. I’m not counting Twilight because that was just abit before the rest of them. The only one of those three I hadn’t heard of was Maze Runner and the Maze Runner ended up being my favourite of the three series.
Maze Runner, if you didnt know, follows the story of Thomas and his friends who escape from a Maze experiment where they were placed there because they are the pure children who are immune to the flare virus. The world has been scorched and the flare virus turns people into zombies. The organisation WCKD, stupid anagram, placed the pure children in mazes to test their abilities and how they are able to create the fluids in their bodies that is the cure for the flare virus. In Death Cure Thomas and his fellow rebels must go to the head city that WCKD control to save their friend who was captured and end WCKD once and for all.
It is alot of story to take in and it’s story that I had to remind myself of as I had to watch the two previous films the nights before I saw Death Cure. It has been awhile since the last film had come out, due to an on-set injury of Dylan O-Brien. Watching them again the films aren’t as good as they used to be and you can see why the whole dystopian future young adult film genre is slowing down quite abit. There was days where a new Hunger Games series was rumored but those rumours have died down.
When watching Maze Runner: Death Cure it is pretty simple to see why that genre is dying down. Everything has simply been done. When I say everything has been done I don’t just mean the type of films and the storylines but also the deaths and other moments in the films. The Maze Runner series of books are apparently really good but I haven’t read them myself. One interesting thing I noted in my head as I watched the film is that yes this movie would be a really good book. The twists and turns are unpredictable but that’s only if you can’t see them coming. Now you might think well you could still see them coming in the book but I mean if you can’t actually see them coming with your eyes.
Too many times does Death Cure solve its problems with something you can see visually, whether that be the fact that a guy is standing in front of some zombies or some people didn’t join the main crew so they’re there to come save them later. It’s a film where not enough risks are actually taken, and for it’s long run time it’s certainly repetitive. I would relate it to playing a game like The Last of Us where you are fighting off zombie-like creatures and normal humans but woven between all of that is a fantastic story where you don’t know who is going to live or die. With Maze Runner: Death Cure it is pretty obvious as the film plays out who is going to die or not and that’s unfortunate for the level of quality the film has to it.
Maze Runner: Death Cure feels almost like The Dark Knight Rises, and despite The Dark Knight Rises being my least favorite Nolan Batman film it does have an intense and fast characteristic that makes it enjoyable. Death Cure shares that characteristic as the film is one thing happening from the start to finish and it is both presented well and shot well by Wes Ball, who directed the other two Maze Runner films. I just wish the film had it’s twists and turns be less obvious so I could enjoy them more.
The young adult dystopian genre is pretty much over and done with now and it’ll be interesting to see what happens with this void in films that are for that audience. Out of the three main franchises, I’m glad that Maze Runner was the last one as it is just that little bit better than the others. Maze Runner: Death Cure, despite having the terrible hashtag of #deathcure, is long yet a good film that finishes off a period in cinema history that teens used to love and not care about obvious twists.