They say that facts don’t change people’s minds, feelings do. You can make an air-tight logical argument and back it with facts but it will never sway people as much as a meme on Twitter. Maze Runner: The Death Cure understands this and rather than spend time and energy on plot logistics, simply goes for the emotional core and drives from there. As nonsensical as the plot is, as contrived the situations, Maze Runner: The Death Cure is exciting. Sure I had to work to suspend my disbelief, rolled my eyes so often I was worried my face would stick that way, but still it was a good time.
Young hero Thomas embarks on a mission to find a cure for a deadly disease known as the “Flare”.
I have such a love/hate relationship with adaptations of Young Adult Fiction. Why is it that the bad guys are always a Corrupt Social Order and the only ones who can bring them down are a band of Gifted teenagers who have no need for practicality because they’re just so talented? Oh right, that’s the demographic it’s marketed to. Got it. But despite the moral absolutism and the unbelievability of the settings, the characters, their actions or their goals, I still can’t seem to quit Young Adult Fiction movies. Maybe I like a simpler plot from time to time or maybe I just like a cast so young I feel dirty for watching them. Hard to say.
It was a good cast this time. Dylan O’Brien is so handsome. But no shirtless scene. Oh an attempt was made, half heartedly; but lifting up a shirt to check for a wound is not the same as full on bare chested fan service. Will Poulter, likewise, wore a shirt. I loved Patricia Clarkson, who played one of the few nuanced characters of the film. And Aiden Gillen was a wonderful villain. He was smarmy, he was capable, he was gloriously duplicitous and pretty convincing despite how mustache-twirlingly evil his character was.
There was an interesting message though, in the midst of all this, a compelling philosophical point. Do the ends justify the means. In the Maze Runner universe, medical breakthroughs can come about by torture. Is it worth torturing a group of people so mankind as a whole can be saved? I found this interesting as every character had a position in relation to this question, I just wish they’d actually done something with it. Because after posing the question, Do the Ends Justify the Means, what did Maze Runner, The Death Cure conclude? It doesn’t. It just wanders off as if it had forgotten, which it likely had. There was also great potential for the idea of Earned Power versus Innate Power which only got ONE LINE but could have been great if they’d even tried.
So is Maze Runner: The Death Cure worth watching? Yes, I guess, if you’re a fan of the series or have some time to kill. I kept confusing it with other Young Adult movies, wondering when Katniss was going to show up and declare them all Divergents. The action scenes were good, it was too long and doesn’t really worry much about believability. Crackerjack timing is really hard to pull off, for example. If you’re going to carry out a ridiculously complicated plan, you have to show how difficult it is to get it right, otherwise it just looks like fluke. Just saying ‘it took months of planning’ doesn’t cut it.
Rating: [star rating=”2.5″]