Post #4, Adaptation of "The Maze Runner"

For "The Maze Runner" an aspect that will certainly be difficult to capture is the sheer scale of The Maze itself, The Maze isn't simple it's a massive and long series of always changing twists and turns that has carte blanche in the book as it doesn't need to consume material space, but in a movie adaptation The Maze would need to be condensed. Not so much as to change the scale and impact it has on the book, but The Maze couldn't be a prop or a series of stages it'd need to be fairly CG to work properly.

Another scene/aspect of "The Maze Runner" that may be difficult to adapt is the feeling of terror the characters go through when The Maze stops shutting down at night. The whole premise of the book being a mass lab-rat testing site works because as each character enters the safe haven of The Glade they integrate into a new society and attempt to solve The Maze, which just so happens to be filled with mechanical monsters who exist to both hinder and aid the 'Gladers' called Grievers. The Glade remains a safe place because at night when the Grievers become most active The Glade shuts out entrances into The Maze, this has been going on since the beginning and none of the characters could never imagine The Glade not being safe. But when the final subject enters The Glade the doors stop shutting and the Grievers are free to attack non-stop. Capturing unspoken emotion is already something movies have a hard time doing, trying to reenact that scene without placing it in exact proper context could prove difficult.

The ending of the book which I won't go into great detail about would be the hardest thing to really capture, as "The Maze Runner" is part of a series the book ends fairly nonsensically and without a great deal of explanation as that is expected to be taken care of in the next novel. In movies unless there is a lapse in time where cutting off like that is logical like in the "Lord of the Rings" series then leaving the audience of a movie with something that isn't really a cliff hanger but a massive list of questions gone completely unanswered can really ruin a film. As the entirety of the story takes place in The Maze and The Glade itself when the book ends and you learn that it was some sort of very elaborate test to ensure a fairly vague event it becomes a very stiff and difficult contrast to deal with wrapping up a movie. It's as if a movie like "Titanic" underwent all of its events but at the very end instead of a prologue, you see Jack waking up on a beach and the trailer for "Inception" plays, very hard to grasp.