The basic premise of the film that spoils no more than any trailer would is that teenage boys wake up in some kind of garden/forest/field with no memories and are surrounded by high stone walls which only have one exit, a maze. The maze has giant stone gates that open at dawn, and close at dusk. If you're on the wrong side at dusk, you die, because giant slugs with cyborg spider legs will eat you.
To start with I just want to say the actors are great, the first fifteen minutes of the movie are no doubt the strongest. In this short opening act not only do we establish a superb premise but the characters really pull us in without falling into the high school cafeteria tropes I was expecting thanks to some OTHER movies that have been popular lately. I'm looking at you, Hunger Games. Nope, not in this movie, it refuses to be that cheap. Even though there are realistic social divides among the adolescent males that inhabit the field, any actor with decent screen time gets to have his character treated as an individual instead of a stereotype.
The first act however ends up being crucial in understanding just how bad this movie is; the intriguing premise, the care the actors put into their roles, the delicate way characters are presented, and most importantly how your imagination predicts these characters and their factions will interact with each other in this Lord of the Flies inspired film (book technically, I suppose) all mean jack shit.
That's right, you heard me, jack shit! The interesting, unique and diversified characters quickly turn bipolar with little or no time in between their "shifts" in personality. If you go see the movie, you'll know when this happens, I know you will because everyone in the theatre I was in said, "Whhhaaaaaaattt?" collectively.
The head maze runner, who explores the maze one day with the leader of the tribe is seen in the distance desperately trying to drag his wounded leader back into their side of the gate before it shuts, it quickly becomes apparent that he isn't going to make it in time. The boys on the other side plead with the runner, "Leave him, it isn't worth it for both of you to die!" but the maze runner has such fierce loyalty to his dear leader that he continues to drag him even though he's destined to fail. The main character is stirred by his display of loyalty and rushes to their aide, only for all three of them to end up trapped on the wrong side of the wall. Immediately the runner looks at the protagonist and says something along the lines of, "You just killed yourself, idiot! Whatever, I'm leaving this loser here, he's dead weight!" and proceeds to calmly walk away.
That isn't even the dumbest example, sadly, almost every scene from that point on just got worse in a kind of snowball effect.
For example, their camp was attacked by cyborg slugs at night and everyone was screaming, "Hide in the woods!" and proceeded to hide in very dark areas while carrying very bright torches. I could keep giving specific examples but I think you get it now, we've all seen better decision making in horror movies.
After all of this effort though, after sitting through the whole movie, I was excited to see the ending, or at the very least the cliffhanger for the second, hoping the story would end as strongly as it had begun. Sadly, the ending was horrid, evoking laughs from the viewers sitting around me.
Except the first ending, which was them coming out of the maze to shortly gaze at a lab full of dead scientists riddled with bullet holes before being "rescued" by some local ninja terrorists was fake. Yep, that's right, fake. At the last ten seconds of the film we are informed that the bullet holes were just the scientists playing dead with catsup smeared on their clothes and the ninja terrorists were simply actors. The final scene was evil-scientist -boss-lady wiping catsup from her temple with a napkin. That ending wasn't met with laughter by the audience, but with vulgarities.
My final decision on this movie is a firm, NOT RECOMMENDED. I did my best to like this movie, and the superb acting and unique characters with their own identities coupled with an intriguing premise was refreshing, but the rest of the movie seemed determined to punish its audience for becoming invested.