The Maze Runner: Where are you running to?

Disclaimer: This review is based on the film, and not influenced by the Maze Runner series. 

My first question, upon viewing the Maze Runner, is why a group of scientists would create a maze, where seemingly healthy males, in a very Lord of the Flies existence, could be studied for a cure to a virus that appears to have no cure, especially if an antidote already exists for whatever infliction is caught in the maze.
Further, if the idea was to inject the boys with the virus, and see which develops immunity, it does not explain the need for a maze – in many ways it sounds counterproductive.  But perhaps these are questions best answered in the books. 

In a more existential manner, the maze – as a metaphor – represents the birth of social hierarchy in a patriarchal form.  With a clean slate, a group of just boys are selected and introduced to a “survivor-esque” situation, which they dub the glade.  They build forts, a farm, and create rules to follow.  Within this glade, and amid the confusion of their plight, the boys build a society that becomes their safety net.
Which is why, Living for years in an all male society, the boys are dumbfounded that a lone female – Teresa – is the last person brought up to the glade.  Did the scientist run out of male bodied persons or was Teresa part of their show?  Regardless, how did they think the virus would affect a male body versus a female body given that the whole planet is suffering from this unknown infliction? Was there a similar experiment with just females?  If not, there should have been.

In another matter, the boys’ reaction to Teresa was to treat her as an anomaly – a sense of curiosity.  This leads me to question if the lack of poise with the opposite sex was due to their isolation within the glade or have the boys never interacted with females prior to Teresa’s appearance.  Perhaps we’ll never know, but what is known is that despite her presence her character does very little to improve the situation.  She, like many female characters in film, becomes an empty plot device. 

It is an accurate depiction of how I believe patriarchy came to exist as we know it today.  It is ironic that it takes an unimaginative dystopian future to give us a glimpse to humanity’s past, but alas here we are.  In creating societies, building foundations to countries, male identified people created their own form of a glade without the consideration and utilization of female identified people.

Gally (Will Poulter) is the perfect personification of rigid patriarchy set in his ways, afraid of change.  However, Teresa is not the change that challenges Gally as one would assume.  She is hardly a threat to the status quo of the glade.  It is the film’s male protagonist, Thomas that threatens Gally’s whole existence.  Thomas’ presence revives a desire to change the course of the boys’ lives by breaking the established rules.  This is unsurprisingly very similar to how society functions today.  Males challenge males while women watch in the background.  

It has always bothered me that during apocalyptic/dystopian films, having one or even two women in the film feels like it is filling a quota rather than allowing women agency in something as life altering as the end of the world.  The Maze Runner is another film that fails the Bechdel test; there may be, theoretically, two women in the film, but neither ever speak to each other or are even on screen together.  I understand that the book was not written as such, but inconsistency like this does build over time, polarizing the roles of female identified people in all media forms, and as a female moviegoer it is difficult to relate to the films with stories I enjoy. 

As a cinematic venture, The Maze Runner was a moderately fair dystopian film.  It is a series of books, so the ending left on an almost anticlimactic place, but certainly if you love the actors and one main actress in the film then you’d surely enjoy what the film has to offer.