And with all that, Maze Runner had something in the first movie that made me want to watch it. Yes, it's all incredible beautiful teens fighting the evil uncaring adults who envy them their youth. Yes, it's got all the shortcomings of lazy writing. I know you'll find a way to do what's right. My hope for you: when you're looking back years from now, you'll be able to say the same. If I could do it all over again, I would. But from that moment you ran into the Maze, I knew I would follow you anywhere. From the first time you came up in the box, just a scared little Greenie who couldn't even remember his own name. I never thought I'd miss that stuff so much. And I remember the taste of Frypan's stew. Just the little things like where the sun used to hit the Glade at that perfect moment right before it slipped beneath the walls. And I just repeat them over and over like a prayer, and it - And it all comes flooding back. So every night, I've been saying their names out loud. It's losing myself to this virus, that's what scares me. But even if it's not my first, it's likely to be my last. Obviously, I don't know if I wrote any before the Maze. This is the Millennial dream, as imagined by a non-Millennial.Newt: Dear Thomas, this is the first letter I could remember writing. It’s also unclear why both The First Arm and WCKD are almost exclusively populated by teens and young adults, giving the impression that the interns are running everything. This franchise has still not convincingly explained why WCKD needed to allocate its resources into putting a bunch of kids in a rather expensive looking maze in order to cure a virus. If you spend any time whatsoever thinking about the logistics, motivations, or world-building of The Death Cure, it all starts to fall apart. (Though watching Aidan Gillen beat up an actor we’ve been trained to think of as a teen is a tough sell.) ![]() The movie delivers on that action front, from the train shootout in the film’s opening minutes to a zombie chase sequence to plenty of hand-to-hand combat. The Death Cure is much more interested in giving us non-stop action scenes-including not one, but two airlift escape set-pieces-than exploring complex moral dilemmas (not that these two things are mutually exclusive). However, he is ultimately a narrow-minded character. Thomas wants to save his friends Teresa wants to save humanity. The Death Cure puts a lot of effort into making Thomas seem like the unshakeable hero, a protagonist whom we should unreservedly throw our support behind. Teresa’s decision to betray her Glader friends in service of finding a cure is treated as an unforgivable crime both by the remaining Gladers and the movie itself. It’s characters like Teresa who point towards The Death Cure‘s wasted thematic potential. ![]() In an effort to rescue Minho (Ki Hong Lee) from WCKD’s clutches, Thomas and friends hatch a plan to break into the Last City, humanity’s final bastion against the Cranks, those who have been zombified by the Flare virus. ![]() ![]() Thomas (O’Brien), Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), and Frypan (Dexter Darden) have survived with The Right Arm, a group actively resisting WCKD and its desperate search for a cure to the Flare virus, a pestilence that has wiped out most of humanity. The Death Cure picks up shortly after the events of The Scorch Trials. As far as franchise-ending installments go, it’s one of the better ones. We’re probably never going to get that final Divergent installment we might as well enjoy this last, gasping breath of the Young Adult dystopia genre. It’s not good, but its earnest in its engagement with its source material, giving the franchise’s fans a satisfying conclusion to the series and non-fans (if any of them see this) almost two and a half hours of action-packed, wistful YA nonsense. Watching The Death Cure brings out a nostalgic feeling for an era decidedly past, rather than simply an irritation at the formulas of the young adult dystopia. It still does, but only a year later, it’s far enough behind the trend that you almost feel sorry for it. It’s the straggling third film in a franchise, an installment that suffered delays following the serious injury of star Dylan O’Brien during filming. If The Death Cure had been released when it was originally slated, back in February 2017, it would have felt dated, contrived, and derivative. The Maze Runner: The Death Cure is a movie coming out a good few years behind the Young Adult dystopia trend.
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