Anders has been asking to watch The Mazerunner for days. Tonight we sat down to watch it as a family. I don’t get it.

I am not a big fan of the YA dystopian novels that have been coming out in the last 15 years or so. The Hunger Games, Divergence, all of the “young people in danger of death” books and stories just make me feel sick and angry. I guess it’s not just these books though. I get sick about The Cask Of Amontillado and The Lottery and all of those unnecessarily cruel stories.

I don’t like feeling that way. I get a pit in my stomach that takes forever to go away. I get that these provide us a chance to think about our own world and where we have situations that mirror the dystopias. I get that they can help us think about ethical dilemmas or the human condition. I just hate the icky feeling I get.

I prefer to think about these dilemmas with my mind rather than with my heart. I don’t like to have my emotions manipulated quite that much. I like to read about philosophy and ethics a lot. Critical theory and essays are much more my cup of tea. I guess I’m dry and boring that way.

[Warning: Basic level spoilers ahead]

But The Mazerunner? It feels like it’s entirely too far fetched for me to even care about what is happening. I understand with the “disease wipes out tons of people” narrative – that’s actually kind of interesting and definitely plausible. I get the “young people placed in perilous situation through no fault of their own” narrative too, even if I don’t really like it. The human test subject angle is interesting too, and could be plausible. But this giant fucking maze that changes at night and is super tall and has killer animal/robot hybrids and it’s all set up to test unwilling subjects? Who paid for this? Where did it come from? How did they construct it? Who constructed it? Not to mention, why do they have to have the killing? What role do those stupid monster things play and why did the testers leave these gates open all of the sudden? Are those stupid monsters robots? Where did they make those? If so, why make them have such stupid little mouths rather than big pincher mouths like actual scary spider-looking monsters? And why make them have such easily squooshable bodies if you can make them out of metal? For such powerful villains, who can make a giant maze like that and design killer monster-robot hybrids, they are pretty stupid.

They have these boys in here for three years and then all of a sudden they send up one single girl and they’re like “That’s all, folks!” WTF?

None of it fits for me; it doesn’t seem internally consistent. I want to be into it because Anders loved the books and loves the movies, but it’s entirely too difficult to suspend THAT MUCH disbelief. I can suspend a lot of disbelief too, when I have to, but it has to be internally consistent and have the basic answers to relatively simple questions. This gigantic maze thing could be fine, but it seems like there could be much more logistically easy ways to test whatever they are trying to find out. Hell, you want to stress out a lot of teenagers? Give them some unclear, open ended homework and tell them it’s the difference between passing and failing. THAT’S a stress test.

Maybe I’m just too old. Or maybe I am thinking about it too much. Whatever. I hope the workers who built that stupid maze were unionized and had good health benefits. That’s what matters.