Doing Okay Until the End...

Rating: 5/10 (4 May 2015)

Maze Runner is accused of being a Hunger Games rip off. Well yes, but is that really that bad?
It is end you do it poorly.
Maze Runner is about a bunch of teenagers trapped in a staging area of some sort and the only way out is through a maze.
I thought Maze Runner would be about finding their way through the nightmarishly complex maze full of traps, dead ends, monsters, and praying you find an end.
*Major Spoiler*
You find out they already mapped it out.
Yeah, by the time Thomas, our hero, arrives he is told by the Asian kid (whose name I'm not sure they ever use) that they already mapped out the whole thing. There are 8 sections and every day one section will open and the other even will close. At the end of each section is a number.
In short, what the movie should have been about, is summed up in two minutes of conversation.
Thomas manages to kill one of the monsters and they get a device of it which unlocks a new area which has the exit. But one of the leaders is convinced Thomas has done nothing but bring danger to them by killing the monster which makes little sense because we don't have the context for it. Douche teen (again, I don't remember his name) says they've always coexisted with the monsters which makes no sense since they seem really dangerous and determined to kill them.
To make matters worse, that night, they're attacked by the monsters and many of the teens killed.
With little to lose, Thomas leads most of the teens (minus douchbag and a handful of his followers) through the maze and it turns out those numbers were exit code. That would have been cool if we were there to see them find the numbers.
They go out of the maze and into some hall and find an exit sign. Which is actually the only funny scene in the movie.
And this is were the movie really flies off the rails. It turns out its Resident Evil.
I'm not kidding. It's not a Resident Evil movie, but the sun scorched the Earth, most of the human race was killed, and then some rage virus broke out. These teens are the only ones immune to the virus and this was some kind of test which raises a million questions like:
1) Why risk killing the few people immune to the virus? 2) Why erase their memories? 3) If you needed to test them and make sure they were ready to take back the world, why not tell them and send them to a military style training facility? 4) Why didn't you tell them the truth? Wouldn't saying "you're seriously our only hope or its the end of the human race" be a pretty good motivation? 5) If you could build a sustainable environment like where the kids were living with these giant walls, why not just move in and live there?
Then are questions like how much they don't climb the vines. Sure they say they don't go all the way to the top, but I can clearly see they do!Why not say there are auto-turrets that will kill you or something? Maybe in the book that its based on the vines really don't go to the top which means the movie added a plot hole.
Also the teens themselves really aren't that interesting. I remember Thomas, girl, douche bag, leader/black kid, Asian teen, teen who seems to be Thomas's other friend, and Chuck/Piggy from Lord of the Flies.
I will say I'm kinda' interested in seeing the sequel so it didn't kill my interest that much, but this movie is really stupid when you get to the twist. And that whole exploring the maze would have made for a more interesting movie. Or a pretty decent video game where you have to explore a maze in a time limit before night comes while dodging traps, monsters, and changing walls, find a number and then put it into a code to get out. That be pretty cool.