Another of the many young adult dystopian films

Rating: 7/10 (27 September 2014)

Once again we have another young adult dystopian movie hit our screens, though I must admit that this one was somewhat more engaging than Divergence (and I have yet to see the movies that have spawned out of The Hunger Games). I had wanted to see this film since it started being advertised but when I sat down in the cinema and the movie began I wondered if I was going to enjoy it. As it turned out I did, despite the slow start (though it wasn't all that slow). However, I would suggest that the story was hardly original, to an extent.
As I was watching the film I kept on thinking that I had seen a similar story before. In a way it is like The Truman Show, namely because we have this group trapped in an artificial world where they are being watched by an unknown group on the outside, however it is not necessarily a television show for the entertainment of the masses. Still, I could not get past the feeling that there were number of similar elements (especially how the entire premise of the movie is to attempt to escape). The other story that I felt it had borrowed from was Lord of the Flies, however there were a number of differences, namely that we did not watch the boys move from civilisation to a state of savagery.
However it was certainly much better that Divergent (which I ended up finding incredibly corny) though the setting is quite similar (though I will not go into too many details as I do not want to give away the ending). Basically the story involves a young adult named Thomas who wakes up in a cage that deposits him in this large glade in the middle of a huge maze. Every night the maze closes and they hear the sounds of monsters and walls shifting. As such the inhabitants simply try to get on with their life within the glade and accept that they are never going to escape.
This is not an option for Thomas though because he is always looking for a way to get out, despite the fact that he has no memory of where he was prior to being deposited in the maze. The other catch is that the arrival of Thomas heralds a number of changes, which indicates that maybe these boys (and later on one girl) are probably not supposed to remain here forever, and it is clear that this is something that Thomas does not want to do.
As I said, it actually wasn't a bad movie, however it appears that this is the first in the trilogy, so it is yet to be seen whether the rest of the series is anywhere near as good as this particular film.