by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
On August 2 Charles and I
had a rare night home together and we watched the third and final episode of
the Maze Runner trilogy, Maze Runner:
The Death Cure. We’d seen the first two
episodes, The Maze Runner and Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, back-to-back on successive nights in January 2015 and I was at least
mildly curious as to how the cycle would end even though the omens weren’t
good. The Maze Runner began as
a dystopian science-fiction young-adult novel written by James Dashner in 2009
that begat three sequelae — The Scorch Trials, The Death Cure and The Kill Order. The first two got filmed in 2014 and 2015,
respectively, but the third one had to wait until 2018 before its film
incarnation was released — mainly because shortly after the third film, Maze
Runner: The Death Cure, started
shooting in early 2016 the star, Dylan O’Brien, suffered a major injury from
doing the opening action scene — a group of rebel commandos tries to liberate a
bunch of kids from a train that is taking them to the headquarters of WCKD
(pronounced “wicked”) to use their blood for experiments to find a cure for the
Flash virus, a plague that has wreaked havoc on a human race already decimated
by a series of solar flares that extinguished virtually all life on earth (I
guess all the good apocalypses, including
nuclear war and climate change, were already taken).
Though a small army of
stunt performers and stunt coordinators are credited in the final roll, O’Brien
insisted on doing his stunt work in this scene himself — and as a result the
film had to shut down production for eight months while he recovered enough to
play his role. During that time the market for films about teenage rebels
against dystopian post-apocalyptic regimes pretty much died out — today
virtually all the hot movies for the teen audience are superhero films, as if
in the Trump era the kids believe that only if you have super-powers can you possibly fight
back and defeat the Establishment — so, though The Death Cure actually briefly led the box office for 2018, it
was soon swamped by the grosses for Black Panther (a far, far better movie) and one imdb.com reviewer dismissed it as “a weak and predictable ending to a saga that no one
cared about anymore.” There’s something to that — it seems that, while the
makers of the Harry Potter, Twilight and Hunger Games cycles split the final books in those series so
they could get two films out of them, the makers of the Maze Runner films may have mashed the final books in Dashner’s
cycle, The Death Cure and The Kill Order, together into one. (Dashner’s Web site, http://www.jamesdashner.com/the-maze-runner-series/,
mentions impending publication of a fifth book, The Fever Code, but it’s a V. C. Andrews-style prequel to the cycle.) The Maze Runner cycle has been basically The Hunger Games meets Divergent meets The Matrix meets Ender’s Game meets Mad Max, with elements of Lord of the Flies (especially in the first film, in which the
protagonists are teenagers trapped in the Glade from which they have to escape
from the titular maze, and of course they form cabals and cliques and fight
each other) and even The Wizard of Oz (when I saw the security guard patrolling the
outside walls of the WCKD compound I started singing the Winkies’ song:
“Yo-hee-ho, YO-ho”) — and I wasn’t hoping for much during the first hour of the
film.
It begins with that long action sequence in which the rebels, driving
all-terrain vehicles, are trying to hijack a train because it contains teenagers
who have immunity to the Flare virus and therefore hold the key to a successful
treatment for the disease — only whatever makes them immune can’t be
synthesized because, well, let’s just say that as a plot element the
1-percenters who run WCKD and live in the world’s last extant city (defined as
Denver, Colorado in Dashner’s books but carefully kept generic in the film)
want to plug the kids into machines and permanently extract their blood, Matrix-style, in order to keep themselves alive. At the end
of the second film, The Scorch Trials, Teresa (Kaya Scodelario) switched sides from the
anti-WCKD rebellion to work with WCKD and become part of their effort to find a
cure for the Flare. In this film she’s actually an assistant to Dr. Ava Paige
(Patricia Clarkson), head of WCKD’s scientific lab, and she hopes she’s
discovered a cure when she injects the latest serum into a Flare victim and her
lesions actually go away — but they come back within minutes and the victim
goes into the homicidal mania that is the last stage of the Flare disease
before it kills. The first hour of The Death Cure is almost non-stop action, barely motivated unless
you remember in depth the plot premises of the first two films (I had re-read
my blog posts about them as a refresher course, but I’d sprung the films on
Charles without giving him that chance), but at about the hour point of this
147-minute film the action slows down and the film starts delivering a sense of
real emotional conflict and pathos. Part of that may be that Dylan O’Brien, who
plays Thomas (the Asa, Katniss, Tris of this story), seems to have improved as
an actor in the three years since the first two films: his smoldering close-ups
have more definition and he seems to have become better at portraying inner pain
and angst.
And
the WCKD characters — some of them, at least — become more than cardboard
villains this time around: Teresa still carries the torch for Thomas and even
Dr. Paige comes across as something of an idealist in her hope that finally
discovering the cure for the Flare can make up for all the people she’s ordered
killed or exploited for their blood in the quest for it, much the same way the
scientists who created the first nuclear weapons anguished for years with the
hope that some
positive development for nuclear technology would come into being to make up
for the potential for death and destruction, including the total obliteration
of the human race, they had unleashed. (They thought they had done that with
the development of the nuclear power reactor, but they hadn’t.) The only real
100 percent evil person among the principals is Janson (Aidan Gillan), a
totally unscrupulous monomaniac who’s determined to exploit Thomas’s
super-blood because he’s contracted the Flare virus himself and of course he
considers his own life so uniquely important he’s willing to kill just about anyone — including, at the end, Dr. Paige with her crises
of conscience — to make sure he can have Thomas’s Flare-curing blood all to
himself. (Of course, he also has the hots for Teresa himself, which gives him
an emotional as well as survival-driven reason to take Thomas out of
circulation and hence eliminate the competition.) Midway through the movie Dr.
Paige realizes that the Flare virus, which previously needed direct skin-to-skin
contact to transmit, has become airborne — which adds Edgar Allan Poe’s The
Masque of the Red Death (and Roger Corman’s quite good 1963 film of it) to the plethora of
literary and cinematic properties Dashner, screenwriter T. S. Nowlin and
director Wes Ball have ripped off for this story. (Kudos to the producers of
these films for keeping the same writer and director on duty throughout the
cycle instead of rotating them the way the makers of the Twilight and Hunger Games movies did.)
Through much of the middle portion of
the film I found myself flashing back to the early, anguished days of the AIDS
epidemic, which likewise seemed to have come out of nowhere, behaved in ways
previously unknown to medical science, and targeted an already marginalized and
discriminated-against population who united in moving and resourceful, if not
always well-advised ways, to mobilize to protect themselves against not only
the disease itself but the appalling levels of misinformation surrounding it.
Of course there’s a good deal more plot to this than that: Thomas and his crew,
including his best (male) friend Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster); Brenda (Rosa
Salazar), who seems to be his alternate love interest (or maybe she’s after him
but he’s still carrying the torch for Teresa); Jorge (Giancarlo Esposito); (and
Gally (Will Poulter), whom the rest left for dead at the end of Scorch
Trials but who
turns up somehow having survived an attack from a spear in his back, break into
the WCKD headquarters to rescue Minho (Ki Hong Lee), a scared little Asian kid
whose blood is thought to have the secret for the cure until Dr. Paige and
Teresa realize Thomas’s blood is even more effective. To aid in the break-in
they enlist the aid of a batch of plague victims who are hanging outside the
walls surrounding the city — when Jorge spies the walls they have to figure out
how to breach to get in he says, “Those walls are new. I guess
that’s WCKD’s answer for everything,” which in this era of President Trump and
the Border Wall plays quite a lot
differently than I suspect James Dashner and T. S. Nowlin thought it would
(remember that this film was started under Obama and finished under Trump!) —
and when they get inside the walls all
they want to do is destroy the city.
The film ends with a climax in which the
good guys have taken over a vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft and they have
to rescue Thomas and Teresa from the roof of a literally burning building — Thomas makes it but Teresa
doesn’t — and in the epilogue they end up on an island which Vince (Barry
Pepper), a Mad Max-ish character who had the idea of discovering a “safe haven”
in which all the people who are immune to the Flame could hide out while the
rest of the world destroys itself and become the nucleus of a renascent human race.
They end up on the “safe haven” and there’s a tall rock obelisk sticking out of
the sand on the beach at which, like on the Viet Nam War Memorial or the AIDS
Quilt, the survivors chisel the names of the people they’ve lost. (As an
in-joke, the obelisk also contains the names “Wes” and “Dylan,” referring to
the real-life star and director of the film.) Though the ending isn’t quite as
much of a downer than the one of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles — in which the civilizations of Earth and Mars are
both utterly destroyed (and
it’s a testament to Bradbury’s poetic genius as a writer that the book seems
oddly uplifting at the end despite the dire ending) — it’s still a pretty
depressing prospect, especially since we can all too easily flash back to the
often deadly Lord of the Flies-ish cliques that formed around the inmates of the Glade in the first
film and it’s hard to believe this alleged Eden will be any happier or
longer-lasting than the one back in the Glade (or the one in the Bible, for
that matter). Maze Runner: The Death Cure turned out to be a far better movie than I expected, not a great film
but a moving one with depths of real profundity rarely sounded in a
youth-oriented movie, and well worth the 4 ½-year wait!
