This week’s YA dystopian-lite teen adventure features yet more celibate chiselled hotties in some ritualised game-playing future world, who discover that they are in some super-special way different, or divergent, or exceptional. As Nietzsche once said: destiny is cheekbones. Will it never end? Based on an insidiously sequel-spawning bestseller by James Dashner, this film features a teenage amnesiac calledThomas (Dylan O’Brien) who wakes up in a weird grassland called the Glade, enclosed by a mysterious stonewalled maze: this is the only way out, but it’s filled with creepy spider-like creatures.
Thomas finds he is part of a community of adolescents led by an autocratic bully called Gally (Will Poulter), who permits a certain number of boys to explore the maze – called Maze Runners. But are they all just lab rats in some mad corporate experiment? Well, only a Freudian pedant would insist on the symbolism of burgeoning young adults in that spider-filled maze. But these are teenage males who supposedly haven’t seen a female person in years. So when a young woman finally appears (Kaya Scodelario) – shouldn’t that provoke a little more of an, erm, emotional response? As it is, everyone looks at each other with bland intensity, like members of a Christian volleyball team getting a team talk from the coach.
• The Maze Runner and the blight of ‘young adult’ movies
• Will Poulter: ‘Hanging out in Soho House LA, that’s my worst nightmare’
