Poppin' Off- The Maze Runner and Boxtrolls

I managed to make it to the movies a couple of times in the past few weeks, so I thought I'd share my thoughts on them. As always, while I try not to post spoilers, sometimes they do just slip out. So more than likely there's some in here, and if that's not your thing, come back once you've seen the movies :)

The Maze Runner- I bought the book months ago, fully expecting to read it before I saw the movie. But I didn't. Maybe that was a good thing, because at the end of the movie, I saw this boy who was probably around ten years old raging out on his dad about the differences between the book and the movie. He was acting a bit like how I felt about Divergent. So not having the comparisons I guess was a good thing for me, because I really enjoyed the movie. There wasn't any romantic plot to get in the way, and it struck me with a Lord of the Flies meets Lost meets the Hunger Games vibe which I thought was pretty cool. 

The premise, for those of you that haven't seen it or read the book, is that this boy, Thomas, gets thrown into this world and he doesn't know why. For the first day he doesn't even remember his own name. There are only boys in this place, The Glade, and most of them take to him quickly. Thomas gets curious about the big walls around the Glade, and they tell him its a maze and only Runners can go out there, but nobody ever goes out there at night. Things progress, Thomas and one of the Runners end up having to stay the night out there and they don't die, which is a huge deal. From there, everything turns to poo, and this girl shows up in the Glade. She knows Thomas. And together they start to piece certain things together. From there, the movie takes one more leap in craziness, and theres a pretty climactic ending. The ending to the movie was crazy, and I went out and bought book two in the series just to see what's going to happen in the next film. Of course, I still need to read the first one... I would definitely recommend this movie, it was very good.

The Boxtrolls- My husband and I took our kids to see this the other day and I have some mixed feelings about it. Visually, it was stunning. And Simon Pegg and Nick Frost voice characters in it. But I thought parts of it were a little dark for a child's movie, and I also thought it lagged in plot at points. And neither one of my kids came out of the theater talking about it, which is rare. 

The movie is about a boy who is raised by trolls, a town that is trying to kill the trolls, and a bad guy in a Red Hat that's trying to earn a White Hat (the white hat means wealth and high social status, the red were for the bad guys and poor people).by killing said trolls. The town hates the trolls because they think they killed a baby, but that was a story created by the man in the red hat. That baby is the boy that the trolls are raising. Eventually, the boy meets the daughter of the main White Hat, and she tries to help them out. It all ends pretty much how you'd expect it to. I think this movie would have been better off being a rental. 

Have you seen any good movies lately? Or have you seen these? Tell me what you think in the comments below :)