Not a solid movie as a whole

Rating: 6/10 (24 September 2014)

A kid wakes up memory-less to some boys, all similarly memory-less, in The Glade, a clearing surrounded by walls of a maze. He remembers his name Thomas as he learns about The Glade; every morning the maze door opens to different sections changing each week, and closes every evening, monsters called Grievers roam the maze at night killing anyone inside, their sting makes the victim go kind of berserk, it's been three years since the first boy came here, every day 'runners' explore the maze looking for an exit to no avail. When a runner is stung by a Griever and sent to die in the maze, The leader Alby goes into the maze retracing the path. Alby returns wounded, carried by the lead runner Minho, just as the door closes. Thomas runs to them, helping to hide Alby from Grievers. He and Minho trick and squash a Griever.
The next morning the 'box' elevator shocks everyone, sending a girl with a note "She's the last one EVER". Newt, the second in command, decides to punish Thomas for going into the maze but makes him a runner for the next morning. Thomas and Minho retrieve a device from the Grievr carcass. They then match the device to the maze map pattern. The girl Teresa wakes up and talks to Thomas, giving two syringes which Thomas figures out as Alby's cure. Thomas goes to his punishment when the night comes. The next morning, Thomas and Minho reenter the maze, finding new paths with the device. As they go back, the door doesn't close and Grievers attack that night. After that, Thomas uses a Griever tail to sting himself, discovering after Alby wakes up that it helps return some memory back.
Injected with the last syringe, Thomas wakes up knowing he and Teresa were part of the people who put them all in there. Gally, the third in command, decides to offer Thomas and Teresa to the Grievers. But the Gladers are divided; some support Gally while the others want follow Thomas out of there. Thomas' group retrace the new path and Teresa enters the code from the map while the Griievers attack. They escaped and found labs with dead scientists. A video explains what happens; the Gladers were test subjects for brain activity to find a cure for the Flare, a virus attacking the brain, happening after the apocalyptic disaster years ago. But the final scene reveals that there are still more than meets the eye.
The story plot looks like an attempt to even more dramatize the novel's original plot. It changes the novel's story quite significantly, opting out some details and thus inevitably changing the nature of some of the significant characters and their roles in the story. In the movie, the story changes from one that has great emphasize to the individual characters and their relationships, to one that only thinks about the characters getting out of the maze.
Having only one female in the significant character roster, the movie tries to insert a significant dose of action sequences. This enables it to be recognized as an action genre, and also adding up the ingredients to attract the male young adult viewers, the demography less targeted by most movie releases. It will surely be a great move if only the action sequences are that good. Instead, within the all running actions we only see the characters run, merely run, without any real variation in their moves. The slightest variation comes when the Griever attacks come in. And even those scenes only present the boys to be clueless in what they're doing.
The mystery aura is quite well kept for about half of the duration. It's done using the medium paced flow and all those "I only know this" dialog lines. It's still looked maintained for the rest of the duration, but as the focus slightly yet surely shift to the more action oriented sequences, with faster paced story flow, the mystery feels reduced of it's significance.
The acting is just a decent overall performance. Having no senior names on the cast sure takes it's toll in the mentoring of the young talents. Dylan O'Brien does his first lead role In a big-budget movie doesn't really disappoint. It's just that the whole movie doesn't seem to have a solid bound over everything it offers. Kaya Scodelario fails to make her only female character in the story to stand out although she did quite okay. Will Poulter used his experience to be confident, yet sometimes over-acted, on his role here.
My say s that The Maze Runner (2014) deserves a 6 out of 10 from me. A recommendation is just a so-so option from me. This movie is quite an entertainment, yet it falls a little bit short of adequate satisfactory.