Hollywood’s sudden fixation on the young-adult market is all the more fascinating when you consider for the last decade or two, their most highly prized audience has been children in their 20s and 30s.
After years of under-thinking science-fiction and fantasy, suddenly over-thinking, or at least thinking, is in. The scorched landscapes are much the same as they ever were, but the stories playing out across them yield an emotional, as well as visceral, rush. Twilight, for all the sneering it engenders, was the first to find the target. Then The Hunger Games’ levelled its crossbow and struck the bullseye.
Next to take aim is The Maze Runner, a lean, urgent adaptation of the first novel in an ongoing series by James Dashner, and as someone who hasn’t read any of the books but was gripped from the get-go, it feels like another hit.
Like The Hunger Games's Katniss Everdeen or Divergent’s Tris Prior, this is a film about young people slowly realising they’re caught between the gearwheels of a system they didn’t build and don’t want to maintain