Fairly unoriginal, but it's still a pretty decent watch

Rating: 6/10 (8 August 2015)

With this film essentially being sort of cross between Cube and The Truman Show it was never going to win any prizes for being original. However, despite this The Maze Runner still manages to be reasonably enjoyable.
The start of the film is shrouded in mystery; who are all these people? Why are they there? How are they going to escape? It's a very easy spectacle to get swept along with and a lot of this is down to the likability of the majority of the characters and the fact that the majority of them are forced to work as a team to solve problems. The film begins slowly and is what I'd like to call a 'slow burner', but it never felt padded out or unnecessarily long and essentially just starts off by developing a few of the key characters. There are many exciting set-pieces (the first one in the Maze with the griever was great fun to watch). The performances from the principal cast vary, but O'Brien was the stand-out performer with Poulter also being very good as well (it may just be me, but I thought he had a bit of a look of River Phoenix here). As much as I found this generally fun to watch and relatively exciting there were some issues with the film....
Most of the problems I had with this film related to the concept of the maze and its opening times; OK, we learn that it opens at certain times of the day and is open for a certain amount of time, but when watching the film we see runners going in and out of the maze and timing their exits from the Maze to perfection. This made me think that at some point someone must have had to have worked out how long The Maze opened and closed for, but unless you sat there staring at the opening with a stopwatch there's no way you could accurately know how long the walls opened for? I didn't see any evidence of anyone having watches or mobile phones in order to time the opening of the gates so I doubt anyone had a stopwatch. This, to me, was quite a serious flaw, but thankfully it didn't affect my overall enjoyment of the film so much.
Despite the aforementioned issue the mystery, intrigue, excitement and sense of fun that the film offers does help to cover up some of the weaknesses in the writing. It's certainly no masterpiece and it's not terribly original, but if you're looking for a reasonably exciting and intriguing film then you could do a lot worse than The Maze Runner.