Movies - Cube

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	Movies - Cube

Cube is a 1997 Canadian sci-fi movie directed by Vincenzo Natali. Seven people, who are complete strangers to each other, awaken inside a maze of cubes with no memory of how they got there. They find each other and are forced to work together to survive while trying to escape and, along the way, they have various (sometimes frightening) personality clashes.

Despite its low budget, the film achieved moderate commercial success and has acquired something of a cult status as a niche science-fiction title. Much of the film's appeal lies in its surreal, almost Kafkaesque setting — no extensive attempt is made to explain what the cube is or why it is created, or why the "inmates" were specifically selected to be imprisoned inside. Although the world "outside" is referred to, it is presented in an extremely abstract fashion as either a dark void or a bright white light.

Plot summary

Each cube within the maze is either a safe cube, or is equipped with a gruesomely fatal device (e.g. a "sushi machine" that dices the occupant into small pieces or a device that sprays highly acidic liquid onto the occupant). Initially they test each cube they want to enter by first tossing a boot into it. However, this method fails within minutes: Rennes, the 'Wren,' an escape artist who has broken out of six or seven different high-security prisons, dies horribly in a booby-trap the 'boot test' fails to detect.

Leaven, a smart, mathematically-minded young girl, soon discovers that there are clues revealing which rooms are safe to enter: the clues are embedded in the small serial-number-type plaques affixed near the doors of each cube. Each such plaque contains a 3-tuple of three-digit numbers; Leaven's initial conjecture is that a cube is booby-trapped if one of its three numbers is prime.

Leaven also comes to realize that the numbers represent encoded Cartesian coordinates. Worth, who is revealed to have been one of the architects of the cube's outer shell, provides information about the dimensions of that shell (it is 434 feet on a side). Leaven paces off the cubical room and finds that it measures 14 feet on a side internally. Assuming a width equivalent to one cubical room between the large cube and its outer shell, Leaven is able to calculate that the large cube is at most 26 cubical rooms long in each dimension. (Although it is not stated in the film, her calculation appears to assume, apparently correctly, that the outer dimensions of the rooms are about one and a half feet longer than their inner dimensions – i.e. each room measures about 15.5 feet on an external side.) Using the encoded coordinates, she is able to determine that they are just seven rooms from one face of the cube. (It is not made clear how she knows which direction to travel to get there, since the rooms apparently contain no information about their orientation with respect to the axes of the coordinate system.)

However, her conjecture that non-prime-numbered rooms are 'safe' turns out to be incorrect. In fact the deadly cubes are those whose numbers include a power of a prime (including, of course, the first power). Upon this discovery, the prisoners are faced with the task of performing prime factorizations of three-digit numbers – a difficult task in some cases (though not quite as difficult as Leaven presents it to be). Fortunately, it is discovered that Kazan, an autistic savant, can perform such factorizations with ease, announcing the number of (distinct prime) factors each number has almost as quickly as Leaven can read it to him.

Soon, they manage to make their way safely to one face of the cube. Using a rope made from their clothes, they suspend the doctor, Holloway, between their cubical room and the outer wall of the large cube, hoping that she will be able to see a way out. Holloway nearly falls and is caught by Quentin, the apparently good-natured policeman. However, Quentin, who has had a rather vicious falling out with Holloway, deliberately drops her to her death (without the others' being aware that he does so). Quentin then begins to make sexual advances to the young Leaven, and Worth and Quentin fight bloodily.

They come across the dead body of the Wren, realize that they have returned to their original room, and at first believe they have been travelling in circles. But Worth notices that the room that killed the Wren is no longer adjacent to the room they occupy. He and Leaven realize that the rooms must shift their locations over time.

Leaven soon discerns that the sets of numbers on the cubes encode something more than information about their safety and current location: the numbers also signify the permutations the individual cube undergoes as it shifts around inside the large cube. After a few minutes of calculation, Leaven discovers that if they had simply remained in the room in which they met, they would have made it out to the "bridge cube," a single cube connecting the outer shell to the inner cubes. If they wait for the cube to shift, they will be linked to this bridge cube – and the outside world.

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Movies - Cube

Plot summary

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