The Neverending Story

This week Lionsgate Studios announced that after the less than stellar box office performance of Divergent 3: Part 1, er, I mean The Divergent Series: Allegiant, the final chapter of the series will now be a TV movie instead of a theatrical film.

The first Divergent movie was a modest hit that grossed around $150 million, while the second brought in a decent $130 million. Lionsgate then revealed they'd be splitting the third film in the series into two parts in a blatant attempt to rake in more box office earnings in order to "do the story justice and give it room to breathe." The Harry Potter, Twilight and Hunger Games franchises pulled this same "split finale" crap, with great success.

Unfortunately for the studio, Allegiant turned out to be a huge flop, grossing just $66 million against its whopping $110 million dollar budget. I have no idea where all that money went, but it definitely wasn't up on the screen.

It's easy to see why Allegiant flopped. Unlike other Young Adult films, the Divergent series just doesn't have any stakes. In The Hunger Games films, teens are forced to hunt and kill one another in order to survive. In Divergent, teens are forced to pick one of five Factions in which to live and work. Seriously. That's it. They're rebelling against mandatory job placement. The horror. The horror...

Additionally, The Divergent Series can't even be bothered to stick with its own premise. The main concept of The Hunger Games— that of televised killing— was prevalent (to a degree) in every film. The "Forced Factions" premise of Divergent is dropped after the first movie, as the story quickly devolves into a muddled, plotless mess. It was also a huge waste of actress Maggie Q.

And then Lionsgate wonders why these films aren't box office smashes.

The final chapter of the series, The Divergent Series: Ascendant, was scheduled to hit theaters in June 2017. According to studio insiders, Lionsgate has scrapped that notion, and now plans to wrap up the series on the small screen with a much cheaper, scaled-down TV movie. The film will then segue into a TV series, starring a new cast of characters (which I guarantee will never come to pass).

At this point, the studio isn't sure if the cast of Allegiant will return for the TV movie or not.

All I have to say about the situation is "Good!" Serves the studio right for gouging the audience. Greedy bastards. They never should have split the final film in half in the first place. There was barely enough material in the last book for one movie, let alone two. You could practically feel the padding!

The whole sorry affair just pisses me off. I've already wasted devoted six hours of my life to watching these cinematic turds, and now I probably won't get to see the finale and find out how the story ends because they'll likely air on either HBO or Showtime. Frustrating!

Ah well. I can barely remember what happened in any of the movies anyway, so... who cares? 

Let's hope this incident puts an end to the "split finale" phenomenon once and for all.

It Came From The Cineplex: The 5th Wave

The 5th Wave was written by Susannah Grant, Akiva Goldsman and Jeff Pinkner. It was directed by J Blakeson (no period after the J, please).

Grant has had a remarkably eclectic career as a screenwriter, penning movies such as Disney's Pocahontas, Ever After, 28 Days (the Sandra Bullock movie, not 28 Days Later), Erin Brockivich, Charlotte's Web and The Soloist. Now that's a checkered resume!

Pinkner has mostly worked in TV, writing episodes of Ally McBeal, Profiler, Alias, LOST and Fringe. He also co-wrote The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (the one with Electro).

Akiva Goldsman is a very prolific and wildly uneven screenwriter, who previously wrote Batman & Robin, Lost In Space, A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, The Da Vinci Code, I Am Legend, Angels & Demons, Winter's Tale and The Divergent Series: Insurgent. That's right— the man who wrote the Oscar winning A Beautiful Mind also wrote Batman & Robin, one of the worst superhero movie ever made. I told you he was uneven!

Blakeson previously directed just one theatrical movie, The Disappearance Of Alice Creed. 

The 5th Wave is based on the book of the same name by Rick Yancey. Naturally it's the first part of a trilogy, the other two novels being The Infinite Sea and The Last Star.

Ah, another month, another studio trying its best to start up a lucrative new Young Adult film franchise. The 5th Wave has all the necessary elements— a dystopian setting, teens in life and death battles against the system, bizarre nicknames and of course the requisite love triangle.

Unfortunately the film tries to pack way too much into its run time, resulting in a muddled and unfocused script. Ideas and situations are tossed at the screen in rapid fire succession, but none of them are ever given enough time to stick. As soon as an idea or situation is brought up, it's quickly ushered away to make room for the next one.

It's also an extremely derivative movie. You can't swing a dead cat in this film without hitting a chunk from another, better movie. Take equal parts from The War Of The Worlds, Ender's Game, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, Independence Day, The Walking Dead and espcially The Hunger Games, mix thoroughly and you'll have a pretty good idea what The 5th Wave is like.

The 5th Wave a very low budget film, costing just $38 million. Virtually every effects scene is in the trailer, so if you're expecting a big budget disaster porn epic like 2012 or San Adreas, you'll be disappointed. On the other hand, the small budget practically guarantees the film will make a profit. Unless it completely tanks at the box office, expect to see The 6th and 7th Waves (or whatever they end up calling the sequels) in the next few years.

SPOILERS, I GUESS!

The Plot:

Cassie Sullivan (played by Chloe Grace Moretz) is a typical high school teen who lives with her parents and younger brother Sam. She spends her days partying, texting and mooning over her crush, Ben Parish.

All that changes when a fleet of alien spaceships arrives and hovers over the major cities of Earth. At first the aliens, creatively dubbed "The Others" (no doubt by LOST fans) simply hang overhead without communicating. Then the Waves begin.

The First Wave is an EM pulse that knocks out all electrical and telecommunication devices on Earth. Cars die and planes fall from the sky. The Second Wave is a series of powerful earthquakes and tsunamis that wipe out entire populations. The Third Wave is an Other-modified version of avian flu, which kills millions, including Cassie's mom Lisa. 

Cassie, Sam and her father Oliver leave their home and head for a survivor camp. The camp is soon visited by a convoy of military vehicles, led by Colonel Vosch. He tells the survivors they're to be relocated to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He orders the children onto buses, while keeping the adults behind for briefing. Oliver puts Cassie and Sam on a bus and assures them he'll see them soon. Sam forgets his teddy bear, so Cassie runs back to get it. When she returns, the buses are gone.

Meanwhile Vosch tells the adults that The Fourth Wave has begun. The Others are using humans as host bodies and are now moving freely among the population, making it impossible to tell friend from foe. The crowd begins panicking, and the soldiers open fire. All the adults, including Oliver, are killed. Cassie finds his body and moves on, determined to find Sam.

The kids are bused to Camp Haven, a military training facility. Sam is there, along with Ben, Cassie's crush. Sgt. Reznik injects Ben, now nicknamed "Zombie" with a tracker in the back of his neck. She shows him a boy who's been taken over by an Other. She gives him a special viewer which allows him to see an x-ray image of the parasite inside the boy's skull. She hands him a remote, telling him to press it and kill The Other. He hesitates a few seconds, then presses the button.

Cassie is foraging along a highway when she's shot in the leg by a sniper. She wakes up inside a house, her leg expertly bandaged. Her savior is Evan Walker, a twenty five year old "teen" who's also surviving on his own. She wants to leave and find Sam, but Evan says it's too dangerous. She sneaks out that night and runs into the woods, blundering into one of Evan's traps. He finds her and protects her from an Other who's patrolling the woods for humans. He agrees to help Cassie get to the base to find Ben. 

Meanwhile Ben, er, I mean Zombie, Sam and the other children are being trained to be soldiers. Zombie is made leader of his squad. A tough, no-nonsense Goth girl called Ringer (Jesus, this nicknames) shows up, determined to overthrow Zombie and become squad leader herself. Conflict! How can we fight The Others if we're fighting ourselves?

Vosch tells Zombie they have reason to believe The Fifth Wave— in which the human-looking Others begin hand to hand combat against any remaining survivors— has begun. He outfits Zombie's squad with special helmets that will allow them to easily detect Others.

Zombie's squad goes on their first mission, to clear out a nest of Others in a destroyed city. They spot and kill many Others, and hole up in an abandoned building to regroup. For some reason Ringer removes her tracker, and immediately appears as an Other to the rest of the squad. Zombie realizes something's up, and removes his tracker and gets the same result. He makes the incredibly intuitive leap that Vosch and the rest of the military have been taken over by The Others. The Fifth Wave is actually human children, who can be easily manipulated and fooled into thinking the remaining humans are really Others and wiping them out.

Cassie and Evan camp in an abandoned car overnight, and eventually give into their carnal desires. The next morning they're attacked by Others, and Evan kills them with superhuman strength. Cassie realizes that Evan is an Other as well, something the audience figured out the first time he appeared. 

Evan tells her that he's a sleeper agent, sent to Earth years in advance of the invasion. When the Other ships finally arrived, it was like a switch was flipped in his head and he lost his humanity. However, his love for her (oy) is overriding his Otherness, making him "human" again. Horrified, she runs from him and is intercepted by the military.

She's processed like Zombie and the others. During heindoctrination she realizes Reznik, who's wearing an alarming amount of lipstick, is an Other. They fight and Cassie knocks her out in the most hilarious way possible. Cassie just happens to run into Zombie, and is finally reunited with Sam. The base is rocked with explosions, and Vosch gives the order to evacuate. He has the armies of child soldiers flown out in large C4 transport planes.

Cassie, Zombie and Sam are captured by Other soldiers and are about to be executed, when, wouldn't ya know it, Evan appears and kills the soldiers. Evan says he's rigged the base to explode (?) and tells Cassie and Zombie's squad to run. 

Outside, Cassie, Zombie and Sam are picked up in a van by Ringer and the rest of the squad. They escape just as the base explodes in a fireball. Cassie realizes Evan sacrificed himself for her, and the rest of humanity.

Cassie and the squad then set up camp, and we get a hopeful, groan-worthy, "This Isn't Over" ending.

Thoughts:

• I really wish the film had spent more time on the first three Waves that hit Earth. In fact they could have made compelling and action-packed films about each one.

Instead the film breezes through very abbreviated Cliff Notes versions of each disaster, as if the director can't wait to dispense with them so he can get to the kid soldier stuff and the love triangle.

• What a coincidence that one of The Other's ships not only appears in Cassie's hometown of Dayton, Ohio, but decided to hover right over her street!

• The First Wave wipes out all electricity, which means no newspapers, radio or internet. News and information would likely be scarce, if not nonexistent. Yet during Cassie's opening narration, she somehow knows how many people have been wiped out worldwide. Maybe she's estimating?

• During the Second Wave we see London and Bangkok wiped out by tsunamis.

Tsunamis can generally travel about ten miles inland (depending on the size of the wave and local topography). London is around fifty miles from the sea, and Bangkok about twenty. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if those cities could really be overrun by waves a hundred feet tall.

• Let's play Spot The Influences! As I said earlier, this is one of the more derivative films I've seen in many a day. It's like the author was ticking off scenarios from a checklist of other movies. Let's run down its various inspirations (potential spoilers ahead):

The War Of The Worlds: Alien invaders arrive and being systematically eradicating humanity.

Independence Day: Alien ships appear and hover over major cities before wiping them out.

Ender's Game: The military trains kids as soldiers to battle an alien horde. The twist is that the kids think they're participating in a simulation, when they're actually killing the aliens for real.

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers: Alien pods invade from outer space and replace humans with exact duplicates.

The Host: Same thing— squirmy aliens take over human bodies and drive them around.

2012, The Day After Tomorrow, San Andreas: Huge natural disasters destroy the world's most famous landmarks

Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Host, and many more: The female protagonist is involved in a lukewarm love triangle, as she has to choose between two hunky but bland male love interests.

The Walking Dead: The remnants of humanity try to survive a zombie apocalypse as they pick their way through ruined cites and clogged highways.

The Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner, and many more: Teens in a life and death struggle against a dystopian nightmare world.

• There's a huge, potentially fatal plot hole in this film. At the refugee camp, Colonel Vosch gathers all the adults into a cabin and tells them that The Others are using humans as host bodies. Cassie is nowhere near the cabin during this briefing, yet later on she somehow knows all about the Other-controlled humans. 

She does stand just outside the cabin door as the crowd inside begins to panic and is mowed down. I suppose it might be possible that she's got really good ears and overheard Vosch's announcement, or heard murmurs of "What? Others taking over humans?" but it's iffy.

• In addition to having good eyes, Cassie apparently also has nocturnal vision. On her quest to find Sam, she stops every night and writes in her journal, sans flashlight.

• When Sgt. Reznik shows Ben an x-ray image of an Other, it looks like an enormous, softball-sized deer tick clinging to its human host's brain.

Honestly it doesn't look like there'd be nearly enough room inside a human skull for something that big. Maybe it eats part of its host's brain to make room? And how the hell does it get in there in the first place?

• The film never quite makes it clear if the tick-like parasite is The Others' true form, or if that's just the illusion they use to dupe the child soldiers. I have a feeling they're saving the answer for a potential sequel.

• Sony Product Placement Alert! During the kid soldier training montage (yep, they learn to be soldiers through the power of a montage!), Sam looks under a bed and sees a Spider-Man action figure. He grabs it and holds it triumphantly over his head, as the rest of the squad screams that it's booby-trapped.

A bit later Cassie wakes up in Evan's house and goes snooping. One of the rooms has a movie poster for Tim Burton's Big Fish very prominently displayed on the wall. Whaaa...?

OK, I can understand throwing a Spider-Man reference in there, since Sony still owns the movie rights to the wall-crawler. But Big Fish? Sure, it's a Sony movie, but it was released in 2003! Why the hell would they want to remind the audience of that film?

• If you didn't foresee that both Evan and the military officers were all Others, then you've never seen a movie before. You could spot that particular plot twist coming down the street from several miles away.

• The Other's justification for using children as soldiers is frankly pretty dodgy. Supposedly they use kids because they can be more easily bamboozled into thinking humans are really Others, and wipe out the rest of our race. But the Others already had adult agents moving stealthily among humanity, doing the exact same thing. So why'd they need the kids?

Obviously the real reason for the child army is because this is a Young Adult series, and kids wanna see kids killing adults and/or one another. Plain and simple. 

The first three Waves— the EM pulse, the earthquakes and the plague— are all pretty epic. After that the Waves kind of peter out. Others taking over humans, and Others training kids to kill their own kind? Meh. 

• Apparently the Others must up the adrenaline level of their host bodies or something, because when Evan's attacked, he easily tosses several grown men fifty feet into the air.

• In the book (which I have not read, but read about) Cassie and Evan are sixteen and eighteen, respectively. In the movie actor Alex Roe plays Evan, and he's currently twenty five. Chloe Grace Moretz is currently eighteen. That makes their inevitable relationship a little too statutory rapey.

I guess it's possible that we're supposed to believe Movie Evan is eighteen, since it's a time-honored Hollywood tradition for thirty year olds to play teens.

• Ringer arrives halfway through the film to shake up Ben's squad. You can tell she's a rebel who plays by her own rules by the thick raccoon makeup she wears around her eyes. Does she really take the time every morning to outline her eyes like a football player? And does any branch of the military really allow female soldiers to wear makeup?

Now that I think of it, Cassie's hair also looks pretty darned good for someone who's been traipsing through the woods for days, sleeping outside.

• Speaking of makeup, tough-as-nails Sgt. Reznik's face is literally caked with foundation, mascara and bright red lipstick. We're talking Lucille Ball levels of face paint here. 

In fact the movie even goes out of its way to call attention to her over-the-top look. When Cassie and Reznik are fighting, she slams her against a glass partition so hard it cracks. As Reznik falls to the floor, we see a big ol' impression of her bright red lips on the glass.

I'm wondering... was this supposed to be a subtle clue that Reznik was an Other? After all, an alien probably wouldn't know much about human fashion, or how much makeup is too much. If that's really what they were doing, then kudos. It's seems a little too subtle for this film though.

• Since this is a Young Adult movie, it's state law that it has to contain a love triangle. The relationship between Cassie, Zombie and Evan is given so little attention though that I don't know why they even bothered with it at all. We get one brief scene where Zombie gives Evan a suspicious glance, and that's it.

• At the end of the movie Evan sacrifices himself to save Cassie and the squad, seemingly dying in the process. If there's a sequel to this film I guarantee he'll return though.

The 5th Wave is yet another example of a studio hoping to start up a successful Young Adult franchise. Unfortunately it's highly derivative, and features a muddled, by the numbers script. Stick with The Hunger Games, which seems to be the gold standard of YA films. I give it a C+.

It Came From The Cineplex: The Maze Runner

The Maze Runner was written by Noah Oppenheim, Grant Pierce Myers and T.S. Nowlin, and was directed by Wes Ball. It's based on the novel of the same name by James Dashner. Ball is primarily a visual effects artist, and this is his first shot at directing a big-budget movie. He does a decent enough job with the script he's given.

Sigh... another day, another Young Adult Dystopian Sci-Fi story. The Maze Runner takes its place along other such stories such as The Hunger Games, Divergence, Matched, Delirium, Life As We Knew It and many others. Bookstores and Hollywood alike love these things. And why not? They're big business right now. Teen readers and moviegoers can't seem to get enough of them. These stories are like a license to print money.

The formula's pretty simple. First you invent a futuristic fascist society, which, let's face it, is pretty much how most teens see the world. Second, drop in a young protagonist who just doesn't fit in, so the target audience will identify with them. Add a love triangle and throw in a rebellion against the oppressors. Drag the story out into a trilogy (or in most cases these days, a quadrology), then sit back and watch the money roll in.

The Maze Runner is a prime example of this formula. It's an interesting sci-fi story with an unusual setup and an intriguing mystery to solve. Unfortunately everything unravels at the end, as the origin of the Maze is a big letdown that makes little or no sense. Better they should have left the mystery unsolved.

The film also spends far too much time setting up the inevitable sequels at the expense the current story. Gotta make sure there are dangling plot threads so the audience comes back next year, right?

In addition to being similar to The Hunger Games and its ilk, it reminds me a bit of Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series. In Riverworld, every person who ever lived and died on Earth is resurrected along the banks of a million mile long river, which is bordered by sheer thousand foot high cliffs on each side. After a while a group of adventurous souls decide to sail up the river to try and discover where they are, why they're there and who's responsible for it all. Sounds pretty similar, eh?

The movie was originally scheduled to premiere in February 2014, but was pushed back to September 2014. It's generally regarded as a bad sign when a movie gets delayed, but it turned out OK here.

MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD, INCLUDING THE SECRET BEHIND THE MAZE!

The Plot:
A teenaged boy wakes up inside a rusty elevator, with no idea where or even who he is. At the top of the elevator shaft, he finds himself in a large meadow called the Glade, which is surrounded on all four sides by the walls of an enormous Maze. He's welcomed by a group of other teen boys who arrived the same way he did. After a day or so he remembers his name is Thomas, but that's all he can remember.

As Thomas becomes part of the makeshift society set up by the Gladers, he learns that they're are trapped in the center of the Maze, which is guarded by terrifying, unseen creatures called Grievers who come out at night. Unlike the rest of the boys, he's intensely curious as to the nature of their situation and why they're there. He eventually becomes a Runner, one of an elite group who explores the Maze during the day.

After many excursions into the Maze, Thomas and another runner called Minho discover a door that leads out. They take a group through the doorway, and discover the disappointing secret of the Maze.

Thoughts:
• This film is a prime example of why screenwriters should think twice about resolving their mysteries. Think about how many intriguing setups were ruined by mediocre payoffs. Under The Dome, The Village, Identity, Cube, and the grandaddy of them all, LOST. No matter how good you think your explanation may be, it's going to be a letdown because the audience can always imagine something better.

• When Thomas first arrives, he can't remember anything, not even his name. Alby, the leader of the Gladers, tells him his name will come to him in a couple of days.

Some of the other Gladers' names: Gally, Newt, Frypan and Zart. Hmm. Those are not names. Did their memories get scrambled? Or is this one of those deals where everyone in the future has some weirdo name like Katniss and Peeta?

• Alby tells Thomas that he was the first Glader and he's been there about three years. Once a month the elevator comes to the surface and brings supplies and a fresh Glader. Based on that formula and doing the math, there should have been fewer than 36 Gladers in the Maze (since a few died over the years). It certainly looked like there were more than 36 in the crowd scenes.

In the book it's explained that the elevator brought up more than one Glader at a time. But this ain't the book, and Alby specifically states it's one a month.

• Thomas hears a terrifying roar, and Alby tells him there are monsters patrolling the Maze. He matter-of-factly says they're called "Grievers," the same way you'd point up and say "That's called the sky." Sorry, Alby, they're not called that, that's the cockamamie "future slang" name you gave to them.

Chuck tells Thomas that no one knows what the Grievers even look like. They're so deadly that nobody has ever seen one and lived to tell about it. Then Thomas is attacked by Ben, who was stung by a Griever and is going through the "Changing," some sort of deadly disease. So in other words Ben saw a Griever and lived to tell about it, right? Then why doesn't anyone know what they look like?

One last thing about the Grievers. They had a pretty cool design; half fleshy monster, half robotic spider. Or at least I think they looked cool. We never really get a good look at them, as they're shown in shadows most of the time, and director Ball seems to be in love with the "shaky cam" fight scene technique.

• Why does the Maze look so old? When Thomas and Minho run inside it, the walls are crumbling and moss covered and look like they've been there for centuries. Isn't the Maze only three years old? Did the builders deliberately make it look old to hide its true age from the Gladers?

• Thomas suggests to Newt that they try to climb the Maze walls, to see if there's a way out. Newt causally dismisses his plan. Thomas then tries to offer more ideas, but Newt shuts him down each time before he can even finish speaking. Newt says that whatever ideas he has, they've already tried them.

How the hell does he know that? What if Thomas was about to suggest skinning a few of the weaker Gladers and making a hot air balloon from their hides? I bet they hadn't thought of that one! 

It just seemed irresponsible to not even listen to someone's plan before shooting it down.

• So once a month the elevator comes to the surface, bringing a new captive along with barrels full of supplies for the Gladers. Apparently among the supplies they bring are plenty of hair care items. Virtually every character sports freshly cut locks, loaded with tons of "product."

We're told that everyone in the Glade has a specific job in order to help them all survive. I'm guessing one of the boys must have been designated the official hair stylist.

• Speaking of styling, Minho the Runner had this impressively huge shelf of hair that juts out seven or eight inches past his forehead, like the bill of a baseball hat. If they ever make a live action Jonny Quest movie, this is what his hair would look like.

• Gally is the movie's Designated Asshole. You know, the character who makes things difficult for the hero for no other reason than because the script says so. Every story has to have one. Think Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, or Joffrey in Game Of Thrones.

• The Gladers have three rules. Number Two is "Never Hurt Another Glader." Gally violates this one several times during the film, but no one ever calls him on it.

• Every night at dark, the massive doors to the Maze close and grinding noises come from within. Minho tells Thomas this is the sound of the Maze changing. It does this every night so the Runners can't memorize its pattern.

Later he takes Thomas into a hut and shows him an elaborate model he made of the maze. He admits that he and the other Runners have mapped out the entire thing, and there's no exit. They're keeping this a secret though, so the other Gladers don't lose hope. 

Um... didn't Minho say the Maze changes every night? How do you make a model– or a map– of something that's constantly changing? Whoops!

• A month after Thomas arrives, the elevator comes to the surface again. This time it brings a girl! A girl who seems to know Thomas, and who's carrying a note saying she's "the last one ever" to be added to the Glade.

A couple things here. First off I'm convinced that the filmmakers deliberately chose an actress (Kaya Schdelario) who looks more like Kristen Stewart than Kristen Stewart does, in the hopes that the cachet of her Twilight films would rub off on their production.

Secondly, the movie completely avoids the fact that it's just introduced a girl into a colony of horny teenaged boys, some of whom haven't seen a female in three years. I realize they've got plot points to hit and don't have time to examine how this will affect the fragile Glader society, but would it have killed them to have Newt decree a "Hands Off" policy?

Maybe the Maze builders added some kind of anti-boner drug to the Glader's monthly supplies.

• Thomas and Minho eventually find a way out of the Maze. They convince most of the other Gladers to follow them, so they can all escape. WARNING! I'm gonna be discussing the reasons behind the Maze here, so this is your last chance to turn back!

The Gladers exit the Maze and discover a lab full of dead scientists. Before they can wonder what's going on, a monitor flickers to life, and a recording of Ava Paige, the head scientist, proceeds to info dump the origin of the Maze to them.

So what's the big mystery? What's the reason behind the Maze? Did aliens build it to study humanity? Did the gods create it to amuse themselves? Is it a manifestation of Hell itself?

Nope, it's none of those. Instead it seems the Earth has been decimated by a gigantic solar flare. If that wasn't enough, shortly afterward an epidemic (also confusingly called the Flare) rose up and killed off even more of the population. A group of scientists formed the World In Catastrophe Killzone experiment Department, known as WCKD (pronounced "wicked"), which may possibly be the most tortured and contrived acronym I've ever heard. WCKD built the Maze to research why certain youths are immune to the Flare, in hopes that a cure could be found.

That's it? Are you flipping kidding me? THAT'S why they built the Maze? These scientists are survivors of a global cataclysm. Manpower and resources are no doubt stretched very thin. In the middle of all this chaos and want, they somehow managed to construct an enormous, miles-wide Maze for the sole purpose of observing the subjects within. And in some mysterious way that's left unexplained, this is supposed to lead to a cure for a disease.

I honestly don't get it. I've approached this explanation from every possible direction, and I just do not understand it. Wouldn't all those resources have been better spent studying the Gladers' blood or brain tissue, to see why they're immune and to possibly synthesize a cure? Isn't that how normal scientists operate? No one in their right mind builds a goddamned maze to find a cure for the flu.

You can't even use the excuse that it's a "survival of the fittest" kind of trial, because strength had nothing to do with surviving or navigating the Maze. 

I really liked the film and was totally onboard with it right up until the end, and then it just lost me. I honestly wish they'd have just shown the Gladers walk through the exit of the Maze and faded to black, leaving us to imagine what they find on the other side. That would have been a hundred times better than the limp, wheezing ending we got.

• Ava Paige, the lead scientist who's been screwing with the Gladers for the past three years, is played by Patricia Clarkson, who was none other than Tammy 1, Ron Swanson's first wife on Parks & Recreation! Perfect casting!

• After the Gladers learn the truth about the Maze, they prepare to head for the exit and the world beyond. Before they can do so, Gally shows up with a gun, determined to stop them. 

How in the name of sanity did he catch up with the group? They left him way back in the Glade, and despite the fact he'd never been in the Maze before, he somehow managed to follow their course and find them in minutes. Did they leave a trail of breadcrumbs for him?

• After Gally's dispatched, a group of soldiers bursts into the lab, grab the Gladers and hurry them out. Are they the good guys? Terrorists? Mercenaries? Well, you'll have to come back next year to find out. This is Part One of a planned trilogy, dontcha know, so we can't answer every little question you have just yet.

• The Gladers are then whisked into a helicopter and as it takes off, we see that the Maze was sitting in the middle of a vast, lifeless desert (no doubt the result of the solar flare), under a leaden gray sky. 

So when they were inside the Maze, why was the sky always blue? And how the hell did it rain in the Glade? Apparently such questions are none of our business, as it's never addressed, and probably won't be in the subsequent Maze-less sequels.

Also, the Glade in the center of the Maze was lush and green, filled with trees and grass. If the scientists had the technology to build a budding oasis in the middle of a desert, why couldn't they have used it everywhere? Why not spend their resources replanting the scorched Earth instead of wasting it building a Maze for sketchy (at best) reasons? 

I'm starting to think the scientists resented the Gladers' immunity to the Flare and built the Maze just to torture them for their own amusement.

The Maze Runner has an intriguing premise and starts out strong, feeling much like a big budget Twilight Zone episode. Unfortunately it crashes and burns in the third act, as the less than compelling reasons for the Maze are revealed. Better they should have left it a mystery. I give it a B.