Last year’s The Maze Runner was a pleasant surprise — a young-adult adaptation that refused to overexplain itself, letting our uncertainty about its bewildering futuristic world mirror the characters’ own. In it, a group of amnesiac young men were trapped in an enclosed glade, with a mysterious and deadly maze as their sole means of escape — an intriguing dysbropia with an existential spin. But then The Maze Runner went and did something stupid: It let them escape from the maze. At the end of the film, our heroes stepped out into a fiery apocalypse, with futuristic soldiers and helicopters and whatnot all around the place. The stage was set for what would surely be a bunch of world-building, overinsistent sequels with little of the lean charm of the original. Now the first of those sequels is here, and for much of its first half, The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials fulfills all of our worst fears about where this story would go (especially for those of us who … [Read more...] about Is Shaky, But Eventually Finds Its Way