This Is How The Maze Runner Should Have Ended, With A Singing Griever
This article is more than 2 years old
As far as modestly budgeted YA sci-fi goes, Wes Ball’s The Maze Runner was a surprisingly exciting trip into a secluded and mysterious world. Still, it wasn’t perfect, and by the time the credits rolled, the curious part of the brain immediately went to work picking apart the most thinly conceived bits of the film. The following video created by the guys at How It Should Have Ended delves into an easy fix to make The Maze Runner a much shorter film. Obviously some SPOILERS abound.
Now, those familiar with James Dashner’s novel are aware that the author spent more time than the film did in explaining away all methods of escaping The Glade, the expanse of land between the Maze’s walls. It wasn’t only an issue of making it up the steep barriers, but also making it across the constantly shifting walls within the Maze, and then back down again on the exterior, where there are no vines to assist in the descent. Plus, it’s not like Grievers couldn’t climb to the top of the damned thing and kill you there anyway.
The movie doesn’t really bother too much with detailing the trial-and-error process needed to escape over the walls. Building a bridge across the walls would probably be more complicated than a ladder system, but something tells me the world of cinema could have made it happen, had that been where screenwriters Noah Oppenheimer, Grant Pierce Myers, and T.S. Nowlin had gone with the script.
I do like how Ava Paige, the person behind it all (played by Patricia Clarkson in the film), feels like the whole plan has been messed up because of the Gladers’ escape. It gives us a peek at another one of the film’s sillier sequences, in which the boys and Teresa make their way behind the scenes of the Maze and into WCKD’s offices. All of the people in there had faked their violent deaths, with Paige fictitiously shooting herself on video to fool them all. This forces one to think that all of these people were just hanging around in those computer rooms, amped up to turn the place into a warzone whenever the gang finally figured out a way out of the Maze. Or maybe everyone had a pager set up for those specific situations, responding immediately when getting the announcement. The life of a WCKD employee must be hard, yo.
Who knows what questionable events may be in store for audiences with the upcoming sequel, The Scorch Trials? The book had its share of crazy shit going on, and we can only expect that to get more fragmented in the change from page to screen. How would you have wanted The Maze Runner to end?
