Yesterday my seventeen-year-old daughter and I checked out the latest YA-based adaptation to hit the screen, The Maze Runner. Based on the 2009 novel by James Dashner, the film follows Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) who begins the film being deposited in “the Glade” a small area of relative security in the middle of a massive maze.
Having seen a lot of YA adaptations over the years (from Twilight to Divergeant – which to be fair sounds like a great title for a paper on these types of films) I’m happy to say The Maze Runner stacks up pretty nicely. The story is equally strange and terrifying, much of the plot focuses on the mystery of the situation Thomas and the other boys (the film has a virtually all-male cast), have found themselves in, and very much like Lord of the Flies, society in The Glade is broken down to simple rules and is unfailingly brutal towards rule breakers.
For me the standout performance in the film belonged to Will Poulter as Gally. Considering his hilarious turn in last year’s We’re The Millers, this character is almost a polar opposite, really well defined, and surprisingly understandable.
The visuals on the maze itself are quite stunning and honestly may be best viewed in a full-sized screen environment, so if you can, try to check out the film while it’s still in theatres, and let me know what you thought.
Having recently finished the Divergent series by Veronica Roth, my next YA series selection was kind of tricky; over the years my kids have read an awful lot of these series and so I have a pretty big backlog of "You gotta read this Dad" titles.
But an upcoming movie and an intriguing premise led me to a pretty easy selection, The Maze Runner, by James Dashner.
The book (the first of four) follows a young man named Thomas who awakens in an elevator lifting him into a wooded glade, populated by about 50 young men and surrounded by massive walls.
Each day four doors open in the walls and allow access to the Maze, a setting intriguing enough to read the book alone, but what Dashner has done here is to introduce a lot of great characters and show us the society they have created in this strange new world.
I could count exactly one time in the entire novel in which I disagreed with an action taken by a character - I'm not saying I liked every choice everyone made, just that they all seemed to follow the logical conclusions given the character and the situation. For YA fiction, this is a pretty great score, as I've had some less than stellar responses from other series I've read over the last few years.
I haven't yet read the other three books in the series, but if they follow the speed and concepts in the first novel, I'm pretty sure I will have an entertaining few months ahead of me.
Well worth checking out.
