The Cube – 1997 – Canada
I love video games. After watching this movie, I told someone, “The Cube is good because it’s basically a video game.” The Cube is about a disparate group of people who wake up in an enormous, puzzle-like techno-dungeon full of traps. They don’t know why they are there, and they never learn, but they want to escape, and working together is the only way to do it. If that doesn’t sound like a solid concept for a video game, game show, or Twilight Zone episode, I don’t know what does.
The entirety of The Cube takes place in a maze of identical, cubic rooms with glowing walls. Many of them are rigged with hidden traps causing several gross death scenes. A man’s head is melted by acid. Another man is diced into chunks by a grid of razor-sharp wires. As deadly as this dungeon is, it’s meant to be solved and is full of mathematical clues to help people navigate and avoid traps. After The Cube’s first few scenes, the physical danger takes a backseat to the psychological danger. Most of the movie is spent watching the characters stress out, have nervous breakdowns, argue, and eventually turn on each other.
The Cube’s characters are interesting, and their anxieties are the movie’s source of tension. Without the psychological drama, the movie would be about people wandering through identical rooms and would be very boring. The characters include: a teenage mathematician, a doctor who is also a conspiracy nut, an architect who might have helped build the dungeon, a mentally handicapped man who is a human calculator, and a cop who turns out to be a fascist megalomaniac. The Cube’s characterization isn’t subtle, and the characters are constantly whining and yelling, but maybe those are realistic responses to the traumatic stress of being trapped in a deadly, real-life video game.
The characters in The Cube frequently speculate about the dungeon’s purpose. It’s hinted that the structure might be a random result of some government’s public works bureaucracy. I’m not sure that explanation makes any sense. There are two sequels to The Cube. I’ve seen them both, but not for many years, so I can’t remember if the dungeon’s origin is ever revealed.
Rating: 8/10 Shrunken Heads. This is the real reason pay attention in math class. You never know when you might wake up in The Cube.
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