The Scorch Trials

This movie is not about another test that the children go through, thankfully. So the "trials" in the title are not really trials at all. Thankfully. But this film, like the film before it, is filled with these sort of absurd peripities where we think we're watching something real and then it turns out that it is all being plotted by someone behind the curtain. This got extremely tiresome in the first Maze Runner, and it continues to be tiresome in The Scorch Trials.

This movie is fairly asinine, and I was annoyed through most of it. (This one, by the way, is about zombies, which replace the first movie's cool spider-robot-brain creatures. Oh well.)

In fact, there isn't much that can be said to redeem The Scorch Trials except that I was glad that Giancarlo Esposito had a nice meaty role that let him show off his abilities. Otherwise, this is utter silliness, although I continue to enjoy these films where twentysomethings playing teenagers run as quickly as they can from things that are chasing them. See: Insurgent.