The Maze Runner Series Movies
Kasey Finkenbinder
In the 2nd movie in The Maze Runner series, The Maze Runner: Scorch Trials, it was revealed that the kids that escaped from The Glade are immune to a disease called The Flare and their blood contains an enzyme (an enzyme that can not be man made) that's produced by their brain that can help fight that disease. It was also revealed that WCKD believed that enzyme in the immune kid's blood was the key to curing The Flare which made their blood very valuable to them. If all that is true and the kid's blood was so valuable to WCKD why were they allowing the Griever's to kill the kids off one by one in the maze in the first movie in the series? I very well have missed an explanation for this in the movie. Any thoughts or insights on this or explinations of what I missed in the movie that would answer this question would be greatly appreciated!
The killzone enzyme is only in the brain. Only active survivalist thinking causes immune teenagers to produce it in large quantities. Those gladers who are more than happy to stay in the glade won't produce it. So killing a few to get the others to go through the maze, is a worthwhile tactic for WCKD.
Of course, the movie diverges from the books. The movie has multiple groups of gladers and WCKD is getting the enzyme from all the passing groups, like blood bags. In the book there is only two maze groups, and WICKED is dissecting their brains to find out how that part of the brain that produces the enzyme works. They also believe only one will have the key to unlocking the cure. So killing a few is okay as they will dissect them anyway.
The movie has the griever attack because the book had it, while ignoring the context in which the attack is okay. That said, the movie had plenty of kids to spare, so killing a few is not a total loss for WCKD.
I will rephrase that, they killed the kids off one by one in the Glade because they were weeding out the unwilling and the ones that gave up easily, they did this because they only wanted the ones that were the best of the best (namely Minho, Thomas and Frypan) to get out and experiment on them later to test their brain patterns. It was all to analyse their emotional patterns and see their reaction to different variables such as kids dying, that is just one of many variables to stimulate and analyse their thinking and see if they give up because if the loss of Gladers. Only the very intelligent teenagers or kids went into the Glade because it was the hardest test of all. But the Grievers killing the kids was just another variable to analyse brain patterns and to see if the kids that get trapped in the maze at night have the willingness to survive and intelligence would state that they would try to outsmart the Grievers (like Thomas did when he went into the maze to save Alby and Minho). But yes, the immunes blood was very valuable to WCKD but they wanted only the immunes to re-establish humanity and those that happened to survive the virus (the Flare). Instead they used the unwilling and the ones that give up easily as lab rats and used them to get the cure which of course as mentioned in other answers is an enzyme in the blood that is produced by a gland in the brain that fights off the disease. This is why WCKD didn't just hog-tie all of the immunes to the ground and harvest the enzyme form all of the immunes, because they wanted to restore humanity.
A film adaptation can often make or break a book series. James Dashner has been closely monitoring the process of adapting his bestselling novel The Maze Runner, so we checked in with him to see how he thinks it is all going. Dashner is also a huge movie fan, and has plenty of ideas about what makes a good adaptation.
I was involved, but on a small scale. Wes has been really awesome about staying in touch, asking me questions, asking for my feedback. I think he has taken a lot of that feedback when it worked for him.
I think to be careful of trying to be literal. A great example is the Harry Potter movies. I am a huge Harry Potter fan, I love the books. The first two movies, I felt were very literal to the book. It was like going through a checklist while I watched the movies, and it bored me to tears.
There are changes, and they all make sense. I will spend the next seven months soothing my fans, preparing them. For example, the telepathy between Thomas and Teresa would just not work in the movie. Telepathy never works, it just looks cheesy and stupid.
So of course we will start with the first in the series. Nothing about this film appealed to me. I think we were all sick of teenagers/young adults in dystopian futures where the oppressed rise up against the elites. It was a formula that had been used over and over again in previous years with Hunger Games, Divergent, ETC. I was curious about the maze aspect though and eventually I did watch it.
I was nervous watching this. There are so many ways they could have ruined it but honestly, I think they did a great job. I think the problem with films is that it can be hard to show how much time has passed and I think the trilogy as a whole feels sort of rushed: not in the sense that they should have dragged it out with more films (God no, they nailed it) but just that so much happens and changes in such a short amount of time. Regardless, I think they did an excellent job with it!
Most of the credit goes to Wes Ball, who directed all three Maze Runner movies, and has proven to have a deft touch when it comes to action. (He's given the added advantage, here, of having several landscapes to work with, as his characters traverse the desert, a series of underground bunkers, and a futuristic city.) The opening of The Death Cure, for instance, drops us in the middle of a full-on train robbery, and the entire scene is a Mad Max-ian thrill. But, of course, all good things must end, and almost as soon as the sequence moves on, it becomes clear that this is gonna be a bumpy ride. There are other similarly inspired scenes scattered throughout The Death Cure; it's just that getting from one to the next can be a trial.
That's not, it should be noted, for lack of trying. The Death Cure is committed to moving things along at a clip to the point that there's basically no exposition whatsoever, which may throw people who didn't watch the first two Maze Runner movies (or just forgot what happened in them) for a bit of a loop. Luckily, there's nothing in the plot that can't be put together with a little patience and a few context clues. Dylan O'Brien stars as Thomas, who represents humanity's last hope as one of a select few teenagers immune to the virus that sent the world into a tailspin. He's sought by WCKD, the government agency responsible for putting the maze in Maze Runner, as they believe they might be able to find a cure for the virus in his blood.
This is where things start to fall apart. Despite their obviously evil branding (WCKD is pronounced as you'd imagine, i.e. "wicked"), WKCD's mission makes sense. To wit, Thomas's erstwhile love interest, Teresa (Kaya Scodelario), has defected to join them, as they seem to be the only people with the resources to be able to research and then develop an effective cure and prevent the rest of the world's population from succumbing to a virus that turns them into zombies, or, in Maze Runner vernacular, "cranks."
As the film's big bad, Janson, Aidan Gillen is terrific as always, and is also one of a frankly impressive roster of character actors who've dropped in and out of the franchise to spice things up (the previous installment notably boasted Lili Taylor and Alan Tudyk, and Giancarlo Esposito and Barry Pepper are holdovers). Though the series' young leads all do an admirable job (particularly Salazar, in a relatively thankless role), their older counterparts tend to steal scenes right out from under them.
In the end, the problem is that there's just too much movie. This feels somewhat inevitable given the inherent difficulty in translating something from the page to the screen, but it can't be taken as an excuse. There are so many set pieces that seem like they might be the final one that when the movie finally does end, it almost feels like you're being faked out, and there'll be one more scene left to wrap things up. It's fun for a while, and then it starts to get a little wearying, especially as the same character dynamics play out over and over again.
Then again, dystopian YA is a genre that's built on tropes, so it makes sense that the Maze Runner franchise should abide by its rules. In fairness, it does better than many of its peers (the Divergent series, which fizzled out before it could come to an end, comes to mind), and the action outstrips even some of its non-genre competition by leaps and bounds.
The highly-anticipated blockbuster The Maze Runner officially hits theaters tomorrow (or in just hours if you're lucky enough for late-night showings!), and after Teen Vogue's premiere with the cast on Monday, we can tell you: It. Is. AWESOME. With stars like Teen Wolf's Dylan O'Brien, Kaya Scodelario, and Young Hollywood's Ki Hong Lee, it's sure to be a major box office hit.
Based on the best-selling YA trilogy by author James Dashner, The Maze Runner follows Dylan's character, who wakes up trapped in a hostile, sky-high, impossible-to-crack maze with a group of other boys who have absolutely no memory of how they got there. Basically if you're a fan of The Hunger Games and Divergent (aren't we all?), you're about to meet your new obsession.
This innovative story first came to Dashner many years ago after reading Lord of the Flies and watching the movie The Shining, with the infamous hedge maze. "I've always been fascinated with mazes," he told us, right after admitting that corn mazes really creep him out. "But I purposefully wrote The Maze Runner to show that I think a group of boys would act differently than how they did in Lord of the Flies: Instead of killing each other and being animalistic, they would form a brotherhood and do whatever it took to protect each other."
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