Don't read the book beforehand if you want to enjoy this movie...

Rating: 3/10 (11 October 2014)

First off, I want to point out that I'm an avid reader. So whenever I see an interesting movie trailer that's based on a book, or hear that a book I've been eyeing is being made into a movie, I ALWAYS read the book at some point. 9 times out of 10, I read the book first because I like to have some idea of what I'm getting myself into. When I saw the movie trailer earlier this year, I thought it looked incredible, so I made a point that I would read it when it got closer to the release date. I literally finished reading the book 1 hour before my movie started, so it was VERY fresh in my mind. But even within the first 30 minutes of the movie, I was in awe at how much was changed.
Like I said earlier, I've read a lot of books and seen the movies afterwards, so I know that there's always that risk of the director changing things here and there to make the movie flow better. But with the Maze Runner, I literally felt like I was watching something completely different from what I read. It felt like a parody of the book because it was so off base. By the end of the movie, I was literally SHAKING with anger. As an overview, the 2 biggest issues were that 1. There simply wasn't enough time to fit everything into the movie (happens a lot, so I don't feel it's a valid excuse), and 2. I think they wanted to market this as an "action" film when it wasn't meant for that genre. In my opinion, this really is the ROOT of the problem, and what forced a domino effect of changes from the original story. Side note: I'm literally holding my copy from the library, and it's labeled as "science fiction", so there you go
A major thing that pained me about the movie was that it was so hard to follow the story and to properly empathize with the protagonist Thomas. There were several moments in the book between Thomas and Chuck that solidified their relationship as wanna-be brothers. The movie has 1 momentcould it have killed them to just add 1 MORE MOMENT? As I saw someone mention before, there was also a very pointless play-fight scene between Thomas and Gally that could have DEFINITELY been cut to make time for another important scene, like I described with Chuck. The lack of Thomas-Chuck screen time made me almost cringe at the scene when Thomas was grieving over Chuck's sacrifice for him. It just didn't feel as genuine as it could have, and I feel like Dylan O'Brien was kind of robbed of having a better emotional pay-off than what he had
Another big no-no: it's called THE MAZE RUNNER. They made maps of the MAZE every single day for 2 (or, as the movie would have it, 3) years, but they were COMPLETELY OMITTED. They created such a fun system with utilizing the maps to spell out code words that would in turn help them escape the Glade via the "Griever hole". But that was completely ignored in favor of what, some metal part of a Griever brain that acts as a strange GPS device that leads them to their exit? An exit which was also changed, to a much-less-interesting version of the Griever hole found over the Cliff. It was exciting to read about them discovering that there was a way out amidst an abyss. There was no challenge with the exit they found in the movie
I could go on and on and on about things that we changed and shouldn't have been, but I don't think I have enough characters to express my disappointment on all those topics. So with that, I gave this movie a 3/10, and have 3 good things to say about it
1) The girl was super hot
2) Chuck's character was by far the most accurate to the book, despite being given very little screen time to display his personality
3) I give them props for some of the Maze scenes when the characters were cutting it close; I'm pretty claustrophobic, so every time someone looked like they were about to get crushed, I was highly distressed. Not too bad for an action movie that shouldn't have been