Science doesn’t yet know how many movies it will take to answer this century’s most pressing question: How will attractive teenagers survive the apocalypse?
“Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials,” the second in a series about a racially diverse but otherwise interchangeable set led by a hardy hunk named Thomas (Dylan O’Brien), throws us right into the action. Stiff, vague bits of exposition establish that the youths had, indeed, been in some kind of maze. Now they are in a large industrial compound, saved from a nefarious organization called WCKD by another mysterious crew led by Janson (Aidan Gillen), a transparently shady guy himself. The teenagers are among the only people left immune to a virus that turns humans into zombielike mutants that shriek like velociraptors.
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Maze Runner: The Scorch TrialsSEPT. 18, 2015
Thomas discovers that Janson is stringing kids up, unconscious and riddled with tubes, for some reason related to the virus. That’s enough info for him to grab his friends and skedaddle. Their unlikely jailbreak sends them blinking into a blasted landscape of ruined skyscrapers and giant sand dunes, like some combination of Tatooine and Detroit, where they hope to survive long enough to find a fabled group of resistance fighters.
“The Scorch Trials” adds nothing new to the unkillable dystopian genre, but it’s at least less ponderous than its predecessor. The many chases and ludicrous narrow escapes offer respectable doses of adrenaline.
“What do we do now?” a weary character asks near the end. With one last rousing speech from Thomas, that’s obvious: Make a third movie, due in 2017.
“Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Occasional gun violence and fewer bad words than you would utter under similar duress.