Core Skills Analysis
English
Michaela watched all three films in the Maze Runner trilogy and learned the names and roles of its characters and the actors who portrayed them. By exploring character histories and details across the shared story universe, Michaela practised remembering information and connecting details between related texts. Comparing fictional characters with the actors who played them also helped Michaela distinguish a story’s imagined world from the people involved in bringing it to the screen. Michaela’s interest in the trilogy supported close attention to narrative and character.
Media Arts
Michaela identified the actors associated with the characters and explored details about the Maze Runner universe across three films. This supported learning about how screen stories are presented through performers and how a trilogy can develop a connected fictional world across multiple works. Michaela also built familiarity with the relationship between a character’s place in a story and the actor’s real-world identity. The activity encouraged sustained engagement with a film series and its creative content.
Tips
Tips Extend Michaela’s interest with a character-and-actor reference chart, then invite Michaela to compare how one character is presented across the three films using specific scenes as evidence. Michaela could create a spoiler-aware timeline of the trilogy’s story events and explain how each film contributes to the larger fictional universe. For a creative project, Michaela could design a new character for the Maze Runner world and write a short scene that fits the tone of the films. Finish with a brief review or spoken presentation that separates observations about the story from opinions about the films.
Book Recommendations
- The Maze Runner by James Dashner: The first novel in the series that inspired the films, offering a way to explore the story in its original written form.
- The Scorch Trials by James Dashner: The second novel in the series, which continues the characters’ journey and supports comparison between book and film storytelling.
- The Death Cure by James Dashner: The concluding main novel in the series, providing another opportunity to consider how a story’s ending is developed across media.
Learning Standards
- English — AC9E7LY05: Connecting character histories and details across the trilogy involved recalling and linking information from screen texts, aligning with comprehension strategies used to analyse and summarise information.
- English — AC9E7LY03: Exploring characters and actors across films provided a starting point for analysing how screen-text features shape meaning; this standard would be developed further by discussing specific examples.
- English — AC9E7LY06: A review, character profile or timeline based on the films would apply planning and creation of written or multimodal texts.
- Note: The supplied curriculum list provides Year 7 English codes. These are possible connections, not evidence of formal assessment or attainment.
Try This Next
- Make a character-and-actor matching quiz using names Michaela learned.
- Create a three-film timeline showing key story details Michaela remembers.
- Write a short review that supports an opinion with examples from the films.
- Design a new character profile and an illustrated scene set in the Maze Runner universe.