The Cube - opinions, watch out! (Spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

I think that this movie can be summed up pretty simply: can I have 125 minutes of my life back? There’s only so far that a bunch of people wandering about inside a giant booby-trapped cube can be stretched, and this movie stretched it for WAY too long.

Hell, even the psychological part of the movie (really the biggest part of it) was full of basically cliched and hackneyed interactions between the characters. About the only interesting bit was the way the good guy - bad guy part ended up working out. Quentin flips his lid and becomes the bad guy, the 'spy (can’t remember his name) is really a good guy in the end

Furthermore, the movie didn’t have a point. It really, truly had absolutely NO POINT. As hard to imagine as that may be, it’s true. You’d think there would be some final, at least partial explanation of what the hell is going on, but nope. You’d think there’s some reason for this thing to exist, but the movie basically cops out on it by essentially saying that the point is that there ISN’T a point. I wonder if they thought that would be cool, or interesting to ponder, or somehow fascinating and deep. I’ll keep on wondering, too, and no more, because it’s not cool, interesting, or somehow fascinating and deep, it’s effing STUPID!

And as if that weren’t enough, the way things finally ended up was enough to really succeed in cheesing me off beyond words:

[spoiler]When they finally get to the exit, the movie sets up the deaths of the loser-architect guy and Leven (spelling?) the math-whiz girl, who happened to be the ONLY character that I even slightly cared about, if for no other reason than that she was the least freakishly neurotic and Quentin was a psycho. Anyway, the movie sets up their deaths in the most incredibly cliched, hackneyed manner possible: When the door opens to the outside, he just stands there and watches, then sits down. When Leven asks what’s wrong, he says “There’s nothing for me out there.” WHAT!? You are in a massive, death-trapped cube with no food or water, you MORON! For crying out loud, you just doomed yourself and Leven because of the little conversation you had to have, ending with her saying “I can live with that,” just before being stabbed in the back by a psychotic Quentin. Of course, she kinda doomed herself, too, by uttering those words. In any case, I would have walked out then if it weren’t basically the end of the movie anyway.

Just as a final note to the writers, having the autistic, mentally disabled computer man be the only survivor is not an interesting point, nor even a particularly good exercise in irony after this trainwreck of a movie.[/spoiler]

And you know, even if the movie was otherwise flawless, I think two hours of wandering through the same frickin’ sets over and over again would have been enough to send me over the brink all by themselves.

In sum: having a premise but forgetting the plot is no way to make a movie.

2

I agree about the ending (it REALLY pissed me off), but overall, I didn’t mind the film. I liked the premise of trying to get through all the trap rooms and the little things they did to do so, and I especially liked the opening scene (you gotta admit, that was fucking cool!).
I had a hard time as well trying to figure out exactly what the point to the whole fucking thing was. I’m sure someone somewhere thought they were being smart and insightful into the human condition, but I didn’t see it. But overall, I don’t feel cheated by the movie, and don’t mind the two hours spent watching it (of course, I’m also the guy who loves such movies as Dirty Work, Bio Zombie, and is eagerly waiting the chance to get to watch Eight Legged Freaks).

3

Well, you see, those kinds of movies are fun to watch. This one was agony to get through. I actually checked the running time again - turns out it was 90 minutes. I find that hard to believe, I couldnt wait for the end to come (though I regretted that by the end).

I think, as you said, I found it kind of pretentious in how it clearly wanted to be a look at the human condition and psyche, but the amateur scripting and illogical “character development” really ruined it. Certainly not anything that hasn’t been done before, and done much better. And so people are going to tell me that “I didn’t get it,” and that “you have to have some intelligence to understand this film,” and I’ll get more annoyed because in fact, it was not very intellectual, and I DID get the point. I just wasn’t impressed by it, especially since there wasn’t much to “get,” period.

Oh, and can you tell I’m feeling calmer now? I had only just finished the movie when I wrote that, and was still furious about the ending :p.

I’ll give you that first scene, though. That was indeed “fucking cool,” not to mention freaky as all hell.

4

What was the first scene again? I complained to the right people and they gave me my 90 minutes back. But now I can’t remember.

5

You are holding The Cube to way too high a standard. You have to realize it was made by people who didn’t have much money to make a movie. I believe they only actually made one cube and the entire movie was filmed in it. Knowing that, I think it was a very clever idea and well executed. Its not easy to make an entire movie in a single relatively small cube.

As for there being no point, The Cube is probably a metaphor for life, so they couldn’t really tell you its meaning. However thinking of The Cube as a metaphor for life, think about how the characters tried to explain it:

"Worth believes that there is no conspiracy and the Cube is nothing more than a mistake, a public works project, which was forgotten and is now out of control. The people responsible for it were fired or sold it, the purpose got lost. People are imprisoned in the Cube just because it is there. You use it or you admit it’s useless. And in fact it is useless. "

“Rennes is sure that they shouldn’t be thinking about these questions. They can’t find the answers as long as they are inside the Cube, so it just distracts from the actual goal: escaping. But still he says once that he’s got the feeling they are watched.”

"Quentins theory bases on THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN. The Cube is built for a rich psycho’s entertainment. "

6

As the movie opens, a thin man wakes up in the cube, wanders around for a bit, opens a hatch and looks into the next cube-room, climbs in and is promptly diced like an eggplant.

I thought it was an mildly interesting but ultimately unsatisfying movie.

7

I haven’t seen the movie, but it sounds like the kind of stuff I would do to computer simulated people if I had a simulated universe to play around with. Who hasn’t built deathtraps when playing The Sims? Maybe it’s all a game.

8

I was really uncomfortable with the fact that the black guy was portrayed as a would be rapist. Bad stereotype. maybe unitentional, but, as i said, uncomfortable.

9

What irritated me was that they’re using the mathematical genius to tell them when some numbers are prime, and one of the numbers was obviously not a prime! IIRC it was an even number. Either that or divisible by three or five. In any case something obvious.

10

I haven’t watched it in a while, but I think the math genius wasn’t looking for prime numbers. He was looking for powers of primes. This means that a number like 27, for example, while obviously not prime, is still a power of a prime and thus signifies a trapped room.

11

When I first saw Cube, I thought that it was a great premise for an episode of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, but as a feature length film it was lacking. Since then, I have read the opinions of others who have watched and reviewed the film, and many have said the same thing. It’s an interesting idea, somewhat entertaining, but not really a great movie.

Star Trek DS9 fans might like it, though, as the math whiz was Nicole de Boer, Ezri Dax in the later episodes of DS9. She’s kinda cute too :wink:

As for the cop being the would be rapist, I didn’t see it as a stereotype of black men when watching the film. I was more concerned of the already mentioned transition of the cop from the rational strategist to psycho. While I think a TV version would have been better, the transition occurring in the film would require a bit more development.

12

I liked it.
I don’t really remember the end. I think that there was a point to the autistic gentleman being the only survivor. Like I said, I don’t remember the end of the movie very well, so I can only guess what I made of it when I first saw it.

I think, much like the movie “Forrest Gump” and numerous others, that “conventional” thinking isn’t always the most efficient in every situation. For instance, sometimes having a simple, unbiased mind is actually useful at times, (like Gump). I know that’s not the case with the guy in “The Cube,” but it’s the same idea. I may be WAY off… it was a long time since I saw it.

The fact that there was no “conclusion” was PART of the story. They could have easily whipped up something, but that was obviously not what the film makers wanted to do. They ended it that way for some reason, and if you don’t see that reason, well… then you have good reason not to like the movie. There are movies I don’t “get”, (that’s point isn’t as apparent to me then some other viewer). Even though I don’t like movies I don’t get, it doesn’t make them “bad” movies.

13

Worth wasn’t a “spy,” just a contractor who worked on a morally insane project, and one of many. His closing lines are, I think, one of the most interesting bits of the flick. Leven asks, uncomprehending of his refusal to finally escape, “What’s out there?”

Worth’s answer is the very reason “it’s taking longer than we thought” for the Adams Mission: a weary, “Boundless human stupidity.” He can’t face that any longer; the cube at least is bounded human stupidity.

The cliches the characters resolved rapidly into never bugged me; most people aren’t exactly subtly nuanced in extreme stress.

In my mental version of the film, there are two optional endings: in the first, Kazan walks blankly out the exit, then the saturation of the light fades so the audience can see. A couple guys in labcoats take his arm and guide him off; one gives him some gumdrops–he likes the yellow ones. The other one makes tickmarks on a clipboard, and says, “Get him fed and rested then put him in with the next group.”

In the second, again he walks out. The light oversaturation fades out, to show him looking blankly around another cube room. Then the camera pulls out and up, to show a huge sea of dimly-lit cube mazes, connected by moving bridges through inky darkness. Roll credits.

14

Drastic, good endings!

15

They could have done the Usual Suspects ending:

Kazan stumbles into the white until the cube door closes behind him, and gradually takes longer and more confident strides, draws a pack of cigarettes from a hidden pocket and lights up.

“Suckers,” he mutters to himself, and makes a PUH! noise on purpose to amuse himself.

16

Brace yourselves – there’s a Cube II: Hypercube (or Hypercube: Cube II – depending on which promo stuff you see.)

It will be released in the U.S. probably in the spring. IIRC it’s already been released in some European theatres, but my info may be out of date.

It has Geraint Wyn Davies (from “Forever Night”).

I actually liked Cube because for a low budget film, it was had a good concept and was executed well for its limitations. It’s on my list of movies that had really interesting concepts that were underproduced – “wish they’d had more money.”

17

Well, that’s understandable. It really screamed out for a sequel, after all.

Personally, I’ll be waiting for Cube III: Hypercube II: Tesseract.

18

I’ve never seen this movie, but when I was in high school I heard about it from a classmate who worked at a movie theater.

We all accused her of making the whole thing up.

19

For the sequel, all the set direction will be based on Picasso artwork.

Get it?

20

Nyuck, nycuk, nycuk!