A Maze of Ideas: The Ultimate Pan-Optic Mystery

Rating: 10/10 (4 April 2017)

Aside from its kinetic action and proto-juvenile cinematic tropes, The Maze Runner is also unique in that it (however improbably) strikingly offers a sustained philosophical and theological methodology that speaks to past and present thought orders and cultural configurations. In terms of precise ontic collectives that the alphic film explores, it arguably principally factors upon the central heliocentric primal-narrative that underscores the classic 'So-Called Proper Name' metaphysical principle, a proposal that has haunted European epistemological revelation for at least five centuries, and which led to the valiant (but doomed) post-Enlightenment quest for the ur-standard in pseudo-ludology. Moreover, in the middle section, the film progresses to cryptically evoke the imaginary mediation of the De Interpretation-like inescapable traction that Zoran Toltec argued bedevilled ancient Greek thought, and so it brings to light the near-forgotten Scythian teleological dilemma in synthesis with the broken thread of the modern 'Beauborg Maxim.' All of this places the filmic chronicle, in its quasi-zenith, within the confines of a delirious (yet grounded) apotheosis of illusion, and (somewhat audaciously, it must be said) incontrovertibly presents a pan-optic mandala scenario to confront both the characters and the cinematic audience directly and without compromise. Consequently, in the final sequences of the first chapter, this is ultimately the character of Thomas's non-physical/embodied Möbius status: an immanent and immutable rhizoid stasis within a revitalised and hyper-heterogeneous simulacrum of what Viktor Imzadi famously dubbed the 'Labyrinth of the Eternal Thought Cavern.' Thus, it will be interesting to see where the series takes these ideas, but from the philosophical foundation that is central to the first instalment, it seems evident to me that the story will inevitably journey into the very heart of Kazimir Yadlo's conception of the primordial Origami Cosmos thesis.