the maze runner book vs movie
one thing that I’m not a fan of with the movies is how the flare is portrayed. I know that the books and movies are basically completely different series after the first one, but I think how they changed the flare did a disservice to the story.
the movie portrays the flare as the zombie apocalypse. it turns you into a mindless animal that has tons of weird looking roots and black eyes and black veins. you get slime coming out of your mouth. the supreme show up with being more angry and getting patches of discolored skin. it is also originally transferred through bites or scratches, like a typical zombie virus. it turns the people into mindless monsters for the characters to defeat.
in the book the flare is a disease that slowly makes you more violent, unpredictable, and savage. it slowly eats away at your brain, but you’re still you. it’s not until the very final stages where you are approaching death, or as they say, past the gone, that you fully turn into a crazy monster. but you still have moments where you regain your humanity. in between your violent rages and moments of losing control, your mind comes back to you. it makes the disease much more terrifying. they aren’t zombies, they are essentially people that swing back and forth from mentally functional to being completely rabid. their physical appearance is obviously affected by this, lots of scars and missing limbs etc. but they are still humans. we need to remember that essentially the flare attacks the brain and mind, not the body. in the book it is hard to tell if someone has the flare in mid to early stages, as there are no physical manifestations. the flare is also transmitted through the air. this is their main motivation in the second book: find a cure. the virus being transmitted through air makes it much scarier, as essentially everybody has it, and the ones that don’t soon will. it is basically an inevitable fate.
by changing the flare into the zombie apocalypse, they basically took away all of the tragedy and horror of the disease. yeah it makes u creepy and gross and a monster, but it also takes away their humanity. they are obstacles, not people. whereas in the books they are first of all people. they are people with moments where they lose control, where they are slowly going insane and are aware of what’s happening to them. they are stuffed into pens by the government, and are left to die horrible deaths. there is no hope for them, yet we see them trying to lice as best they can before the death they know they will face. they have to sleep in crowded corridors, and people that are newly infected and not exhibiting symptoms are terrorized by people who have become violent and rabid due to the disease. and those people are still shown to join into groups and gangs, and they still have some awareness of their situation, and they still stick together. they also are aware that they are being sent there to die, and they want to break into the city because the know that their treatment is wrong.
and even newt’s death is way more sad in the books. because we know that there isn’t a cure. the movie shows that newt was almost saved, but Brenda couldn’t reach him in time. but in the books he never had a chance. we see him slowly get angrier and leave, because he knows he will endanger his friends. he too knows his fate, and he goes to try to live out the rest of his life. when he meets Thomas he is close to the gone, and now has moments of complete violence and loss of control. but we see him periodically snap out of it to beg Thomas’s to kill him. we see that the flare doesn’t make you some killing zombie monster, but it makes you angry and volatile. he says all these awful things to Thomas because of the flare, he doesn’t try to eat everyone around him or smthng. he knows that Thomas is his friend and he can’t help what he says. he retains just enough awareness to know that he doesn’t want to hurt him. and when he has a moment of clarity he asks Thomas to kill him. he chooses to die rather than keep losing control.
it’s just so much more tragic in the books, and it really makes you see just how dire their world is, and makes you understand and yet hate wicked even more.
