My Review of "Maze Runner: The Death Cure"

Maze Runner: The Death Cure came out back in 2018. The first movie had come out in 2014 and the sequel came out the year after. There was much worry that this franchise wouldn't be able to finish off the trilogy as there was quite a long hiatus for the last episode. Due to the length of the hiatus I'm sure a lot of you may have forgotten what had happened in the previous movies by the time you had watched this movie.

It all starts out pretty much soon after the events of the second movie. The freedom fighters have been found and Thomas (the main character) is out to rescue his best friend Minho. Meanwhile, we start to see more of what was going through the mind of "the traitor", Teresa.

We learn more about the dastardly corporation known as WCKD. The head of the organization, Ava, has been seen as the ultimate evil as they've been experimenting with kids to find a cure to the Crank virus. We see a softer side of Ava as she really does have ambitions to rid the world of the virus. Teresa saw this and decided to side with Ava. Unfortunately our heroes see the world in black and white so they don't really buy the excuses.

I liked that they put a more human side for Ava and Teresa. They also did this in the second movie but they really focused more on it in this movie. I guess so that we could have some compassion for these characters. In the end we do have an ultimate bad guy and he's so one sided it's kind of cartoonish.

Thomas' character is pretty consistent throughout the Maze Runner series. He's always trying to do things alone and telling his friends to leave him to his own devices. In every scene he's in he's always trying to be some sort of martyr. He's obviously a very vital character in the series and this episode in the series just pushes it over the edge where his character becomes almost like some sort of religious character. It's pretty easy to spot it as it's been kind of hinted throughout the series. There's no real surprises there.

There are of course a lot of convenient saves in this movie that kind of take away from some of the suspense. I was always expecting someone to save our heroes and for the most part they do. That element of surprise isn't really there until the last act of this movie. There are a few things that had happened that were a little unexpected but in the end I still understand what they were going for with these events.

Although there was a character that comes into this movie that wasn't really explained. It's just too convenient that our heroes are saved by this character and I thought it was pretty lazy writing to just add them to the storyline with little questions.

This time we don't see as many of the zombies as we did in the second movie. This made for a different feel for this movie yet again like the second movie did from the first movie. It's really focused as a search and rescue movie for Minho. There's just an extra side story closer to the end that they don't really go into exploring. I guess maybe they thought that it would be fuel for another sequel if this movie did well enough.

As for the action scenes. I was pretty impressed with some of the effects that they pulled off in this movie. It's a cut above the rest of the action movie's I've seen lately and this movie came out 3 years ago. The camera angles and cinematography for this movie are pretty top notch. They played with some seriously innovative shots and it made each scene that much more dynamic.

The only gripe I have of this movie is that the characters are pretty monotone. They're one dimensional where they're all dogs chasing a bone. They don't really have any other things in their lives that they're interested. It's like watching computer robots just trying to accomplish their mission. This is fine as this movie is targeting young adults. Plus fans of the first two movies are already used to the characters acting this way so they won't see the problems with it.

Overall, it was still a fun movie. I think it was an adequate exit to the series. You may have to re-watch the whole series to remember some of the things that they're referring to though. If you haven't seen the other movies you may get quite lost in this movie. You simply just can't go into this movie without knowing anything because they don't quite explain the backstories. I have to give this movie a 6.5 out of 10. I probably wouldn't re-watch this movie but I'm glad I finally concluded the series.