2015, Movies

The Scorch Trials (2015, Wes Ball)

I did not like the first film at all. But that movie had a “high concept” that I could at least respect on some level – though it struck me as something I would have dreamed up as a teenager – even if the execution was pretty awful. But this movie is worse. Yes, that’s right. It’s worse. SPOILER ALERT if you care about your subpar young adult film adaptations…

The high concept is gone. Notice the “maze” is missing from the title…well, there’s a reason for that. This film takes the surviving characters from the first movie and plops them down in essentially a different story. (There are, apparently, massive differences between the source novel and this film.) What we get is a rote, paint-by-numbers zombie film with just about every cliche from the genre you can think of, as well as a few cliches from some other genres. There’s very little character development – including with the teens, who were basically blank slates to begin with… – and lots of walking around, running and fighting. There are, for some reason, a whole bunch of famous (good) adult actors surrounding these kids, but only Gillen and Esposito get enough screen-time to chew. The rest of them barely have any lines. And the whole thing is just a barely-competent run-of-the-mill zombie movie, but with the cast of the first film.

Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe this is a superior film in that it has fewer blatantly ridiculous holes in it – though the locations sure are nonsense – but at least the first film tried to have an original conceit. This story is basically just a teen version of the Resident Evil movies, without the dogs. And, may I remind you, those movies weren’t good.

2/10

  • Directed by Wes Ball
  • Produced by Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Wyck Godfrey, Marty Bowen, Lee Stollman, Joe Hartwick Jr.
  • Screenplay by T.S. Nowlin, Based on The Scorch Trials by James Dashner
  • Starring:
    • Dylan O’Brien as Thomas
    • Kaya Scodelario as Teresa
    • Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Newt
    • Dexter Darden as Frypan
    • Nathalie Emmanuel as Harriet
    • Giancarlo Esposito as Jorge
    • Alexander Flores as Winston
    • Aidan Gillen as Janson
    • Ki Hong Lee as Minho
    • Jacob Lofland as Aris
    • Barry Pepper as Vince
    • Rosa Salazar as Brenda
    • Lili Taylor as Mary Cooper
    • Alan Tudyk as Marcus (credited as “Blondie”)
    • Patricia Clarkson as Ava Paige
  • Music by John Paesano
  • Cinematography by Gyula Pados
  • Edited by Dan Zimmerman
  • Production companies: Gotham Group, Temple Hill Entertainment, TSG Entertainment
  • Distributed by 20th Century Fox
  • Release date: September 18, 2015
  • Running time: 131 minutes
  • Country: United States
  • Language: English
  • Budget: $61 million
  • Box office: $312.3 million

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