I love movie adaptations. I.Love.Them. In fact, I have an entire blog feature devoted to movie adaptations of amazing books! But every now and then I see a movie that has been adapted from a popular book and I just think, “What?” That was basically my experience with The Scorch Trials. Check out the trailer if you haven’t already:
I suppose I should preface the rest of this rant by saying that I did like the movie – it was a good movie! Really!
I don’t want to spoil the movie, but there is NO real scorch and there is NO trial. How then can this movie even be called “The Scorch Trials”? The comparisons between the film and the book, in my opinion, only go as far as the title and the names of the characters. Pretty much every single other thing in the book is changed. Which would be fine. If this wasn’t an ADAPTATION!
Things that really bothered me about this movie:
(without getting too far into spoiler territory as long as you’ve read the books)
- The second trial never happens.
- The Gladers spend the entire movie escaping and running from WICKED.
- There are no defined “roles” for each character, which was a big part of the book.
- No crazy tunnel traps.
- The “Scorch” isn’t very scorchy. In the book weren’t they constantly trying not to get, you know, scorched?
- The cranks are zombies.
- The Right Arm is a huge part of the movie.
- No monsters at the end.
Look, I liked the movie. I didn’t like the book. I did not like that the movie completely changed everything about the book. This is a difficult opinion for me to even wrap my mind around, but I respect authors enough to feel like their vision should be respected in any adaptation, even if I didn’t enjoy the source material.
