 Just got done seeing the Maze Runner. It wasn't very good. If you like Divergent, you're probably gonna like this, you have a much higher tolerance for just mediocre shit than I do. It's hard to pinpoint when I don't like about it because it doesn't fall into the same trappings a lot of the teen films do. Here we are thrusted right into the glades, right into the fray, a minute in. This guy's going up the elevator and he's here. This is the Hunger Games an hour and a half into the film. So that's good. There's no tacked on teen romance either. I assume there's gonna be one in the later films, but for this one I was like, holy shit. I don't have to sit here for two hours and look at these guys make puppy faces at each other. This is awesome. Director Westbald did a nice job with the cinematography. It looks pretty. You can tell it's a big budget. The action's done fairly well. I say that sometimes it falls into the same trappings the original Hunger Games did where the shaky cameras really just masking the lack of choreography. I mean there's points where these giant mechanical beasts should easily have killed our lead, but don't because the camera is just like, ah, he got away. So that's kind of a cop out, but whatever. I can live with that. What I can't live with is just the bad script. I'm assuming the books better than they usually are, and if you're into it then you're probably gonna like this, but I just thought it was really stupid. I'm not gonna give away the reveal of what the maze is or anything, but it's very shut your brain off sort of material. Will Polter is the only actor that just really grades on me. Okay, first off his eyebrows are like, he always looks pissed. I just can't make sense of his acting. I don't know what he's feeling half the time. And the other thing is his character is just awful. I don't understand. I've never met someone that's so stubborn in wanting to live in a prison. I mean I don't know that many people in prison, actually I don't know anybody in prison so maybe that's on me. The guy that plays Albie looks identical to a young Denzel Washington. I'm throwing that out there. I want to hear and agree. I want to hear and agree. The dialogue is ridiculous and you can tell it's based on a book because everything has a name that the kids apparently came up with. I guess? I don't know. But anytime Peter asks a question the answer's always a vague, oh this is the Glades or what's going on with him? Oh, that's what we call the changing. The changing? What does that even fucking mean? And why do you have a THE changing? Why do you have a title for it? The biggest detractor for me was the maze itself. There is zero variety outside of the spider creatures. There's no thread either. There's no traps, no pitfalls, nobody gets lost in the maze. How is that even possible? Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire manages to have a more threatening maze in five minutes. I had zero expectations going in and that made it all the more frustrating because like I said they did things right. They got away with the forced exposition, they got rid of the love story and they focused on the main event right out of the gates. The first 25 minutes is strong but after that it just keeps going downhill. I remember maybe there was one pretty awesome, pretty cool riveting chase sequence that I think you see quite a bit of on the trailer where the blades are switching. Oh, the blades! That's what they're called. They have a name for those. They have a name for those. This isn't really that much of a spoiler but there's a scene where he reveals a miniaturized version of the maze and it's made out of like little pieces of sticks and whatnot and the guy's like, yeah I've gone through this whole maze, I've seen everything. Oh, except for the area over there that we'll see later. That's just a giant opening that you can walk right through. There's no hidden door. I just walked by that. It reminded me of Said on Lost when he's like, I walked around the whole island, I saw everything. Except for the second fucking island. I missed that. Score time with the possibility of 10-10 being the maximum amount I could ever give a film, zero being absolute dog shit. I'm going to go with a 6. Maybe a 5. 5.5. We'll go 5.5. I've just seen it now so many times. I've seen this movie so many times. Now I have to watch a trailer for at least two more of these fucking things and I'm already out. I'm out. It's bad enough Hunger Games is getting split into two more movies when it barely needs one more movie to tell the last mediocre book story. But now we're going to have more of these. Now we're going to have more diverged shit. God, can we just get some decent made movies, I swear. I swear. I'm sorry. There you have it kids. I'm impressed. Not on the slightest. And I see that there's a shadow that's like blading through my face, the blade, as they say in these films. Stick around though. Next week I will be feuding, since that is the name of the game, Divergent vs Hunger Games vs Maze Runner. Three mediocre affairs, go head to head to head, because I just love torturing myself even further.