The Scorch Trials

The Book

The Scorch Trials is book 2 in the Maze Runner series and continues where the previous book left off. Thomas and the remaining bunch of Gladers are told they have been infected with the Flare (the virus that gradually turns humans into mad Cranks) and the only way to be given the cure is to make their way to the Safe Haven across the Scorch (the desert left across the equator following solar flares).

Sound convoluted? Well it gets worse.. and that's the problem.

The reader has to suspend belief and accept that all the hardships, changes in character and deaths are down to the organisation WCKD needing to subject the young people to a wide range of emotional experiences in order to record brain activity and thereby use this to save the human race.




Dashner is very clever in keeping the pages turning, managing to end nearly every chapter on a cliff hanger so you want to keep on reading, but when so much that happens is based on the control of an outside agency, it's difficult to sustain interest. It's not like the Hunger Games, where the competitors have a clear goal to survive and defeat the other participants, as many of the deaths in Scorch Trials are random (blobs of melting metal that fly at heads and decapitate, flashes of charged lightning) and therefore are not designed to weed out the weakest - just minor characters..


Official film site


The Film

The movie ditches all the clutter and fantastical elements of the book to make a leaner, more believable story. It departs from the novel plot from the very beginning; in the new compound they are brought to, Thomas and new boy Aris do some duct-crawling reconnaissance and discover that the selected survivors from more than two Mazes are systematically being selected and hooked up to machines to drain off their cranium fluid.

His small band of Gladers then complete a successful breakout from the clutches of WCKD and head off into the desert in search of the resistance movement, The Right Arm. This changes the whole plot for the better - from some weird means of manufacturing a cure to a simple pursuit movie from the baddies across a magnificently realised apocalyptic San Francisco Bay area.


The infected Cranks that they need to avoid in the desert are portrayed as 28 Days Later type zombies and are pretty disturbing for a 12 certificate. A scene borrowed from Jurassic Park 2 involving a big drop and a gradually cracking sheet of glass is still nerve shredding, especially with an additional rabid Crank added to the mix.

The ending and set up for the final part of the trilogy, Death Cure, is different from the book, so it will be interesting to see how much more it diverges - Min Ho and a betraying Teresa are taken by WCKD and Thomas is left with Newt and the Right Arm survivors, plotting to attack and kill Dr Paige.