Cube (1997)

July 9, 2018

I remember watching this for the first time when I was in high school when it first came out and loving it. I saw it right around the time I first saw Daren Aronofsky's Pi. I loved both of the films and I think they are what largely inspired my love for math (I went on to study history in college... but that is a story for a different day). I was nervous about revisiting Cube but fortunately, it was just as good as I remember. What I remembered most about the film was its use of math as a survival tool and of course the brutal and creative ways the puzzle kills its victims. These story telling tools were just as good as I remember, but what really pulled me in this time is the dynamic between the trapped characters. The film's writers and actors did an incredible job of creating complex and captivating characters.

The film is about six complete strangers who wake up in a maze of cubed and they have to solve math riddles in order to escape. If they choose the wrong rooms the maze finds various ways to murder the incorrect victim. Gradually as the group of seven begins to dwindle, paranoia and desperation become the bigger threat to the group.

The opening scene sets up the whole movie with a man waking up in the cube going into one of the rooms only to be cubed himself. The special effects are impressive. While being computer generated they don't appear computer generated and stand up to today's standards. This can't be said for many other 1990s horror movies. There are a bunch of other traps in other rooms: One person's face is melted with acid, there is a fire trap, and another trap that is sound activated causing razor wires to slice up anyone who makes a noise. The death traps are really creative especially since Cube came out seven years before the Jigsaw used similar techniques in the Saw movies.

The visuals of the cube maze are really stunning as well. Each wall is separated into squares and geometric patterns giving the maze a futuristic and claustrophobic feel. Each room also has a color to it: Red, Green and Yellow. I read in the IMDB trivia that the movie was filmed inside one cube they just used different colored gels to give the rooms a different appearance. The effect works. I would've thought they build a few different cubed rooms.

Cube is very similar to a Franz Kafka novel. We never learn how the characters entered the cube, who brought them there, or why they are there. This is what is so terrifying about the movie (and the Kafka novels). The idea that there sometimes is no motive in a chaotic world. It is frustrating for the characters and us the viewers. Adding to the alienation theme, we never learn the first names of the characters instead they simply go by the much less familiar last names written on their jumpsuits. The ending of the movie does nothing to answer any question and instead opens up new questions. Throughout the movie, despair, paranoia and eventually madness coalesce as the absurdity of the situation becomes more and more apparent. In order to survive, the characters need to use logic (math puzzles) to escape their illogical predicament.

The film also looks at the true individual when the veneers that society places on us are stripped away. The evil of man is laid bare as one character tries to sexually assault another and murders a different character. The emptiness of another character comes to the front when we learn he helped design the cube and chooses to die in the cube because there is nothing for him in the real world. Not all the characters hide a darkness. One character, a doctor, has true kindness within her. Unfortunately it is this kindness that puts her in the situation where the evil character kills her (he will later be killed when one of the others pulls him between the elevator and the cube slicing him in half and scraping his body against a wall.

Cube is just as good as I remembered it twenty years ago, maybe even better. The movie highlights the absurdity of life in our chaotic universe. This is summed up by one character when he chastises a conspiracy theorist: "This may be hard for you to understand, but there is no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It, it's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan. Can you grasp that? Big Brother is not watching you."