Info

Original Title: Cube
Country: Canada
Director: Vicenzo Natali
Release: 1997
Genre: Mystery, Sci-Fi
Language: English

IMDb | Rotten Tomatoes

A group of people unknown to each other finds themselves in a maze of cubes full of traps. Together they must find a way out.

Cube

The opening scene is of a man (Julian Richings), inside a place composed of rooms, each room with several passages to another, almost identical room. The man ends up dying after being sliced by wires.

Cube

This scene let us know from the beginning how this place is designed, a maze with deadly traps, but that’s not exactly how the main story start.

The main plot begins when a group of five very different individuals wakes up in a room, they’re men and women, all adults but from various ages, ranging from around the 20s to 60s years old, none of them knew each other previously.

Quentin (Maurice Dean Wint), is a divorced cop;

Leaven (Nicole de Boer) is the youngest and is a mathematics student;

Holloway (Nicky Guadagni) is a middle-aged doctor and have some conspiracy theories on her mind;

Worth (David Hewlett) is just a grumpy man who looks to be in his mid-30s;

and the oldest of the bunch, Rennes (Wayne Robson) a man who escaped several prisons.

Quentin is already aware of the traps, so he informs the rest of the people about it, so the group goes from room to room trying to find their way out of the maze, while avoiding getting themselves killed.

Rennes, as a master of escaping, thinks the traps are activated by motion, so he uses his shoe to check if the room is safe. This works for a while until it doesn’t, so Leaven notices that every room with a prime number seems to have a trap, so they proceed with this in mind.

During the struggle to get away, the group finds another lad, Kazan (Andrew Miller), he’s autistic and a mathematical genius, which can help them enormously.

My favorite thing about Cube is the set design, the very nice rooms especially of the lighter rooms, like the one the characters meet for the first time. These rooms reminded me of the Doctor Who Tardis in the earlier days, a clean sci-fi visual.

Another thing I fell in love with were the doors, it seemed so real, an actual mechanical door. It might be a silly thing to be impressed by it, but I like this type of thing.

However, I didn’t like the movie that much, after the end I was left wondering “that’s it?!”. Some people act like this movie is some kind of a masterpiece, one of the most original movies and so clever, so I was fooled.

This movie disappointed me much more than Suspiria. There were things I really liked about Suspiria, and that wasn’t the case with Cube.

I got to agree with the majority when they say the film is original, it is, but originality by itself doesn’t make the movie better than a less original movie. Originality is good, but it must have other elements to complement the originality.

The dialogue, the acting, the twist, the relationship between the characters, the ending, are all things that are below average. Even though the initial premise is original and intriguing, it’s repetitive so after some time, the impact it first had is dissolved.

Doctor Holloway is a little annoying, but maybe I was annoyed because she used the term “holy cats”, one of the most idiotic terms I ever heard, and because she was a conspiracy theorist, I don’t like conspiracy theorists, even though I was one in my teenage years.

Leaven and Worth are tolerable, and that’s a lot to say in this case, because the characters are not great at all, Quentin being the worst of all. He is awful from beginning to end, there is nothing to redeem this character.

In the last act, there is a major change in Quentin’s behavior and some people didn’t like this sudden change, but I didn’t mind because I didn’t like him since the beginning.

Even with all these points I dislike, there is nothing I hated. It’s an alright movie, competently made, with a limited budget that didn’t captivate much, as I said in the Suspiria review, it’s partially my fault to believe the hype.

My verdict is 5 Moons, but who knows, maybe in the future, I increase or decrease the grade, I’m an unstable grade giver.
See you next time.