Analysis Of The Maze Runner

From Scott McCloud’s comic, it becomes clear to see how simplifying a piece of work can affect the viewer. By abstracting a piece of work, an artist pushes the viewer to focus on the most important aspects of a piece.
This technique, however, isn’t just limited to works of art or comic books; it also can be seen in regular books as well. The book that provides the best example is The Maze Runner, by James Dashner. This is a novel that surrounds a boy named Thomas that wakes up in a maze along with the rest of the Gladers, other boys also held captive in the Maze. It’s then up to Thomas and the Gladers to figure out how to get out. We too along with Thomas start in the Maze because of the way the story was written, we knew as much as he did,
This film is centered on a man, Ben Thomas’, and his personal road to redemption for a mistake he made years ago. From the jump, the film has a slow pace and as we start to really pay attention, we begin to see that the plot is not the movie’s primary focus. Who knows who, why things are as they are, etc, these are relevant to the movie but not as relevant as the development of the characters. This development should be considered an important detail because it is something the audience will undeniably feel. Muccino starts the movie discussing a suicide, but that beginning scene isn’t clarified until the very end of the movie. Throughout the rest of the movie, that detail is tucked into the background as an abstract element. Even as the film progresses, the scenes that are meant to provide the audience with more insight on the main character’s life are shown in an elusive & abstract fashion. Because Muccino put the most informative scenes towards the end, he forces the audience to shift their attention. This shift in attention is similar to the amplification through simplification effect that McCloud discusses in his comic. “When we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details” (McCloud 30). Instead of worrying about who Ben was and what he had done, we began to focus on feeling the anger, pain, and