almost like a two hour twilight zone episode

Rating: 7/10 (13 May 2015)

Dystopian. What is that? The word of the decade? I'd never even heard of this word before a few years ago and I'm not sure what it really means and I doubt most people who use it do either. Now I see it at least once a week. I'm still trying to figure out what 'post-apocalyptic' means. That was the popular word in the 80s and 90s for low-budget sci-fi flicks.
Anyway, with the title and concept like 'The Maze Runner', the movie 'Logan's Run' quickly comes to mind. There are some similarities. Both movies are about a bunch of young people, stuck in a man-made environment, running to escape death. And in both films, there are people called runners.
But this film reminds me more of the Twilight Zone episode where a group of people trapped in a large round room escapes only to find out they were just dolls thrown into a toy bin. Too bad this film is not quite as interesting. Sorry for the spoiler, but, in the end, the kids are indeed human, not action figures.
You have to hand it to the filmmakers. They saw an over-crowded marketplace filled with trilogies based on popular teen books and had the nerve to say, "Me too!" And still they submitted something that offered few original ideas and resembled many of the films of this type that came before it recently. That took a lot of guts.
This film isn't that bad. It just feels like it belongs on a Saturday morning along with the cartoons. I still think the Twilight Zone ending would've been better.