Movies - Cube series

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	Movies - Cube series

The Cube series is a set of science-fiction movies that currently includes the following titles:

Cube
(1997)
Cube 2: Hypercube
(2002)
Cube Zero
(2004)

The Trilogy

Cube
(1997) set the standard: a person wakes up in a cubical room with a door in the center of the ceiling, the floor and each wall. Beyond each portal is an identical room, one of many in a much larger cube. The person has no memory of how they arrived. Some rooms are rigged with lethal traps, some aren't. Other people are quickly located in the structure, and the group attempts to puzzle out an escape while arguing who did this to them and why. The prisoners eventually realize that the rooms are moving around inside of the structure and that the numbers that mark each door are coordinates that can help them find their way out. Despite the film's obvious limitations due to its simple concept, many viewers enjoyed the film's stifling atmosphere, conspiratorial tone and stark imagery.

Cube 2: Hypercube
(2002) is a radical departure from the original. The dusky, dingy rooms of the first movie are replaced with high-tech, brightly-lit chambers; the plausible technology of the traps—flamethrowers and extending spikes—are replaced with computer-generated imagery of shimmering translucent walls that disintegrate matter and floating spheres of razor-sharp angles. The group discovers that the cubes are moving, not with lumbering slowness, but instantaneously. They realize they are inside a functioning tesseract in which gravity shifts, space distorts and time splits off into many separate paths. While some hailed the sequel as inspired madness, more derided it as brilliantly conceived but poorly executed, citing in particular the questionable acting and the banal revelation at the end.

Cube Zero
(2004) is a prequel to the first Cube. Despite the memory erasing, dream monitoring and three-course-meal pills, the film comes across as a deliberate attempt to forget the ultra-tech mistakes of Hypercube. (Barbarash openly admitted he was dissatisfied with the previous film, which he helped write the screenplay for.) Unlike the first two movies, which limited themselves to the prisoners' points of view, this film follows two characters, Eric Wynn and Dodd, who are bureaucrat/technicians observing the prisoners. Wynn finds himself caring about the fate of a woman in the cube, Cassandra Rains, and decides to risk his job and his life to help her try to escape. Ultimately, however, many fans were disappointed by the scenes outside the cube, feeling it destroyed the claustrophobic mood that was the hallmark of the series.

The Internet Movie Database provides a good barometer of fan approval. The original film gained a respectable rating of 7.4 stars out of a possible 10. The second garnered a mediocre 5.6 stars. As of December 2005, with under three thousand people having voted, the third movie has only been slightly better received, with 5.8 stars.

Themes

Bureaucracy

The key theme in all three films is bureaucracy and the diffusion of responsibility. The question is repeatedly asked: When someone accuses you of being a small cog in a giant machine that murders people, is "Hey, pal, I'm just doing my job" a valid excuse? The people who say "yes" frequently find themselves re-examining that answer when they are dropped in the cube and must face senseless slaughter at the mechanical hands of the faceless, uncaring organization to which they recently belonged.

Religion

In Cube Zero, the most blatant metaphor for bureaucracy is religion. Owen, one of Wynn and Dodd's former co-workers, navigates the cube to the exit and finds that his fate depends on a single question: Does he believe in God? He answers no. Dodd, following orders, forces Wynn to push the button marked "No" and Owen is immolated in flame. Horrified, Wynn asks Dodd what happens when you push the "Yes" button. Dodd has no idea, since nobody who's fought their way through the cube has ever said yes. The meaning of the scene appears to be a comparison of bureaucracy and religion, and how religion may make a person less responsible for their actions like forms of bureaucracy because of dependence on the divine likening it to a grand diffusion of responsibility.

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