Boxed worldview

Rating: Null/10 (13 August 2015)

Sure, this is inane in what it is, an adventure about teens trapped in a maze, wholly revealing of the boxed world and culture that gives rise to it just the same.
This kind of thing begins with Spielberg, Jaws or Jurassic it's the same world. We're plummeted in a funpark ride and have to lunge from this or that menacing contraption. More likely this incarnation is through Lost, the same funpark only now we had much deeper architecture in the ride, together with the notion that shady forces in the real world control it. Anyone who approached Lost mythology as anything more than excuse to build walls might as well be harping on about the deep insights about the role of science in Jurassic.
A few Hunger Games later we arrive at this set of contraptions. A funpark engineered for the usual thrills, teenagers placed squarely in the middle but now the whole world of the film is a contraption controlled by cruel adults to some inscrutable purpose. The whole film is the same simple contraption controlled by the adult makers of the film, with teenagers enticed into the four walls of the cinema so various gears can whir and move. Tied to ideas about freedom from oppression, it's now the youthful struggle thus reduced to a funpark ride of dodging walls and critters, a cynical thing.
And even something so inanely simple can create interest to the point where a second film is in the works, because of the architecture of the experience. In Jaws it was simple; something lurks below this sheet of water and can be conjured anywhere at any moment. Lost was more intricate, it's the same idea as we find here. Somewhere beyond these walls must exist pattern and purpose that explain everything. The answers are of course cringe worthy when we get them but they were always a tool for immersion.