Did anyone watch Cube 2: Hypercube last night?
I thought the first one was better.
I watched it. I thought that it was a poor remake of the first one. I liked the simplicity of being trapped in a rubix cube. The idea that this cube exists in alternate time lines and in the past and future, well it was kinda dumb. Also frankly, I didn’t get the ending.
What was the on the chain? Was that the way to make the hyper cube? They referred to it as some kind of recording devise. Was she really blind? If not why would she put herself in danger so many times.
I liked the first one better, too. I liked the idea of the Hypercube, but I don’t think they did enough with it.
As a good friend said 'round about 11:05PM last night: “A decent one-hour setup for a third movie.”
I liked the first one better; thought the ending of this one was a bit… meh. Certainly anitclimactic (though the resigned look on Kate’s face at the end was nicely done).
I also seemed to have missed the importance of Sasha/Alex’s necklace. I heard the military guy say “Do you have the device?” but I don’t recall a time in the movie where it was mentioned as being important. Of course, I did scoot out at one point to grab the Ben and Jerry’s, so I could’ve missed something. ::shrug::
-BK
Meh. It started out in the spirit of the first, but couldn’t keep it up. Interesting (sort of) characters were introduced, and then they died without contributing anything. At least in the first one, you got the feeling that the crew was assembled for some reason, possibly weird psychological testing – they had the clues and the right collection of talents to figure out how to survive. In this one, there was no apparent reason for the people to be in there, unless it was to dispose of the people who designed it.
About the only thing they retained from the original was the amazing sense of futility – a bunch of people have an absolutely miserable time of it, and then they die. As for the blonde woman – it became fairly obvious at some point that we weren’t getting her whole story, first of all, she was the only one who had no connection with the hypercube at all, and second, it was pretty unlikely a mere therapist would have been able to beat down a crazed guy with a knife.
The final plot turn made no sense. If they were sending someone into the Cube on a mission, I think they would have equipped her better. Why did the detective get the knife? And why, if she had a mission, would she risk it trying to rescue the guy with the briefcase?
And the one clue to the exit made less than no sense. Unless we believe that a) Someone would write a time without the conventional colons. b) The physicist who figured out how long the Cube would last knew (to the second) when it was created. c) Two random people had wristwatches that were synchronized to the exact second.
I thought it sucked. No, it hypersucked.
While it was nice to see Birkoff from Le Femme Nikita and the vampire detective guy working again, I felt that the cast was just not interesting.
I didn’t even think it maintained the same sense of futility and suspense as the first one. In Cube, you really out a sense that they were wandering around hopelessly for hours or days without food or water. Not to mention the traps were cooler:
The cheese slicer
The acid in the face
The Sushi Machine
etc
Plus, I liked how Cube stayed in the cube the cube itself was an actual math problem.
First, my apologies for quoting SPOILER content outside of SPOILER tags. I don’t think I’m giving anything away by doing so. But to be safe, I’ll post my reply in SPOILERS.
The wristwatches didn’t belong to two random people. Every watch belonged to Jerry. Different Jerrys in different universes. But that explains why the all had the same exact time.
What an extraordinarily stupid movie. I suppose it was too much to hope that they would hire a consultant–say, a high school sophomore with a moderate grasp of geometry–to advise them on tesseracts? Sorry folks, the 60,000,000 rooms the daft old lady mentioned. Not even 10. A tesseract has 8 sides. You could subdivide those sides into rooms, I suppose, but the doorways between such rooms would be perfectly normal doors, with no funky spatial effects. I had a brief moment of hope when the blurb mentioned eight people trapped in the thing. It made sense. Then they blew it.
The spoilers below contain an answer to Milquetoast’s spoiler, among other commentary:
The problem with all of the various Jerry’s watches being synced is that not all the Jerry’s were apparently synced. The first one Simon killed had just awakened, and wasn’t even hungry yet, while Jerry1 was moving around for hours/days before getting julienned. Even if we allow that the disparity happened outside the tesseract–say Izon ran into scheduling issues in Jerry2’s timeline and was late dumping him in there–there were all those time distortions. Surely one of him would have encountered them? It would have been a nice dramatic touch to have several of them out-of-sync, forcing Kate to choose which ones to trust. Of course, nices touches were not exactly well-represented in this monstrosity.
Plot stuff–ties to Izon/the Cube/whatever:
Jerry–Interior designer to psychopathic megacorps. His door design knowledge was clearly a threat to the secrecy of the project, which is no doubt why they hired a consultant. :rolleyes:
Max–Annoying little geek who was suing one of their subsidiaries over software related to one of the bizarre and utterly pointless traps. Afraid that he would call attention to the pointlessness of the project, they shoved him into it. One can almost hear the “Neener, neener, neener” as they did it.
Julia–Obviously, they needed a cute chick for ratings purposes, and Kate just didn’t cut it. Oh, she was a lawyer for Izon. Maybe there was a tesseract-related lawyer joke that got left on the cutting-room floor. They should have kept it. Even lame humor would have improved this mess.
Mrs. Pale-imitation-of-a-character–plot device to introduce the concept of a tesseract to her mouthbreathing fellow victims. Perhaps senility caused her to totally f-up everything she told them about it.
Colonel Whositwitchell–Obviously actually knew shit. We can’t have anyone knowing anything in this monument to drivel, so he has to off himself.
Rebecca–The hapless twit probably tripped and fell in. Honestly, we’re talking about a character whose only contribution to the story is to get eaten. Repeatedly.
Simon–Looking for Rebecca. I guess take-out would have been too easy.
Dead Physicist Guy–Maybe sent in to study the thing before they remembered that they couldn’t get anyone out?
Sascha–Provided the necessary insight to build the thing and jumped in voluntarily in an escape attempt. Note: Frying pan–>fire is not usually a good idea, Sascha. Carried a pendant that was apparently a recording device of some kind–possibly she was gathering evidence with it to blow the whistle. Presumably, that would be voice recordings. There are minor logistical problems with a blind girl trying to make a video.
Kate–Company shill sent in after Sascha. I’m guessing she didn’t have much choice in the matter. Why they cared about her saving the recorder is unclear–most likely as a result of the writers having failed to think it through. Maybe they’re planning to cash in on the vast 60’s-70’s retro market with a “Sounds of the Fourth Dimension” album.
What a freakin’ waste.
No. Not the Jerry watches. The physicist who figured out when the hypercube would collapse and who wrote the time all over the place for some incomprehensible reason instead of just writing a little paragraph explaining things for future visitors must have had some time clock to base his calculations on. So what are the odds that Jerry’s watch was both synchronized with that clock and was accurate to the second?
I rather liked it, a bit better then the first one. It was sucfficently different then the first one, and I’m rather glad they dipensed with the number scheme crap to figure out a way out. The sense of “no way” out worked well. I also felt it was rather interesting, the paralell dimensions aspect, the disparity of time in space. I can’t remember seeing a movie that was that…different in a long time. The corpses that kept popping up were rather creepy as well.
However, I do feel that the sex scene was completely gratutious and pointless, and I also have to wonder exactly why they let a complete lunatic loose in there with a knife.
Starting with the mysterious number, why would some one write it without the colons, like everyone else in the world does?
The really poorly staged bit at the end, where she runs 6 feet and climbs the ladder faster than he can run 9 feet? Not credible, she should have been stabbed in the butt.
Plus, it’s clear that their life span will be limited by lack of water. His eye wouldn’t have had time to heal.
Why did those viscious doors never slam on anyone? They always stayed open exactly as long as required. How about they block them open with clothing?
The deaths had such a Bureau of Standards & Practices “approved violence” feel to them. The deaths in the first cube seemed more nightmarish.
Basically the beginning of the movie didn’t match the end of the movie. Why did they take people who knew something but not much? How was it they couldn’t remember anything? Why did they take so many people who’s disappearance on the outside would be missed? Wouldn’t you use people who wouldn’t be missed if you were going to throw them into the hypercube?
BUT
The threads of the plot they did follow were goot-reminded me of the movie ‘Memento’.
The tesseract was cool.
Liked the bit with the 4 watches.
and Hell, if they could make a series out of Tremors, the could make a series out of this.
i don’t know about anyone else, but hypercube was a complete letdown on my end. I think Cube 2 suffered because it tried to out-do or top the original one. The final result was a film that visually, looked pretty neat, but story-wise, never made a whole lot of sense. I was pretty relieved when the movie ended. I definitely agree with MsSmith, the traps in the second film weren’t nearly as brutal. Oh well, the director of the original movie is set to direct some higher budget films, it’ll be interesting to see what he comes up with.
I just want to know why…
…did they send Kate in there to get the recorder back, and NOT tell her how to get back out? Or does getting dropped in the Cube screw up your short term memory that badly?
“The deaths had such a Bureau of Standards & Practices “approved violence” feel to them. The deaths in the first cube seemed more nightmarish.”
No kidding. Didn’t someone get caught in the doorway of a cube as it shifted.
“rather glad they dipensed with the number scheme crap to figure out a way out.”
IMHO, that made the first one better. The fact that there was an actual method to the madness (and apparantly one based on real mathmatics according to a couple web sites ). Imagine being trapped in a maze made out of SAT Scan-Tron bubbles and #2 pencils.
Hypercube didn’t even make sense. Ok, I get it…It’s a cube with 4 physical dimensions. LxWxHxX. So the original was 26x26x26 rooms. Shouldn’t this cube be the same size but exist in 26 parallel universes? Or is it all in one “universe” and the cubes just shift back and forth in time?. Even if the rooms were shifting between universes or times, how would there be multiple “yous”? Does each parallel universe have it’s own version of the cast?
There are so many more interesting things they could have done. For example, if I encounter Psycho Detective Guy from 10 minutes from now and he tells me I get killed in room 480 323 332 by crushy smashing things, I won’t go in there in 10 minutes. Or maybe I won’t have a choice otherwise it will cause a paradox or something. I thought they were going to go that route, but then they went the suck-fest path instead.
Just a nitpick, but Cube is more like a 3D version of one of those puzzles where you shift one square around at a time to complete a picture, not a Rubix cube where the whole side shifts
It would have been nicer that the Cubes (from both movies) were devices made by extraterrestrials just for human observing.
That would have justified every incongruence.
Spoiler for Philip K. Dick’s “A Maze of Death”, too:
And from my point of view, Kate’s short term memory loss is analog to the suffered by the characters in “A Maze of Death”.