Cube Movie

I recently saw Cube and thought it would fit in well with the "Movies To Consider."

The basic premise is that a handful of strangers find themselves inside a vast machine and they have to rely on each other to survive. The machine is composed of rooms. Each room is a cube, and each wall of the cube connects to another cube - apparently going on forever. Each room has the potential for danger. Enter some rooms and you are sliced by wires, sprayed with acid, or in some way horribly killed. Other rooms are perfectly safe ... or are they?

The characters start to learn about their environment, discovering a mathematical key and an overall model that may be useful in understanding how the Cube works. Will they work together to escape this hell, or will the darker side of humanity take over?

I liked the film, although after seeing it, my mind tried to understand the physics of the Cube machine and how such a thing could be constructed. Then I slapped myself and remembered... it's only a film! -- JohnPassaniti

POTENTIAL SPOILERS BELOW

[A bit like HuntTheWumpus, in other words?] [I haven't played HuntTheWumpus in years, but no, the Cube isn't like the statically interconnected rooms of a Wumpus cave. The Cube is changing, forcing the strangers to understand those changes if they want to survive.]

(Actually, revealing that the cube is moving kinda spoils one of the plot twists.) I love this film too, but not so much for the mechanism of the cube, but for the characters. Each representing a particular archetype of our society (some would say stereotype) and each attempting to find the solution according to his or her own narrow area of abilities and experiences. Attempts by the group to cooperate are only partly successful, and the final outcome is, well, hard for some of us to accept.

Damn, now I'm gonna have to go rent it. http://us.imdb.com/Title?0123755

-- StevenNewton

nice idea , I liked the plot and the characters were sorted out to make it very interesting, but I wished they would have worked it out more. The most interesting thing for me was the way people changed in the cube. I would have liked to get to know more about them, their social behaviours outside, and about the person they are. Just as the cop who had a quite interesting modification in the play ... -- AnnaBlume

BTW, did anyone notice any problems with the mathematical key? I 'think' there is a mistake in there somewhere, but it's not germane to the film. (Or is it?)

If you get the DVD, you can hear the director and writer (I think) discussing this. They drafted in a Maths prof to design the numerical scheme used to label the rooms. He apparently had a 5x5x5 simulation running as a proof of concept. According to the DVD, what the characters say about the properties of the Cube is consistent, but what you see doesn't quite correspond to that. This was because of budget constraints, rather than any desire to introduce a McGuffin or three.

I got enticed to watch that movie because it was advertised to be 'mathematical'. Being a math major, I was intrigued. Upon seeing the movie, disappointed. -- AsKer?

One big inconsistency about this movie is that the characters can move about the cube for 10 hours (the cop estimated by his beard growth before they rest), and stayed in one for an hour (when they slept and later the cop tried to get the student away alone), without noticing that the rooms move or encounter any sign of it, shouldn't that room moved quite a few times already while they sleep? Once they discovered that the rooms move, almost every next room they got in moves, and each room stayed in its position for only a few minutes. And isn't it amazing that the bad guy can find them across so many rooms without getting killed near the end?

Also, I didn't quite get (1) the how they can get the coordinates from the 9-digit numbers (i.e. how she can get x=14,y=27,z=14 from that 9 digits), (2) why they didn't notice immediately that adjacent rooms do not have adjacent coordinates, and (3) how you can embed the permutations of each room in only 9 digits. Perhaps I should pay more attention to the numbers.

-- OliverChung

Some rooms in the Cube only move rarely, while others move more quickly. And it would make sense for rooms closer to the exit to move more frequently than ones in the middle, to make it more difficult to reach the exit.

Besides, it's only a film! :-) If rooms moved frequently early in the film, it would've spoiled the surprise, and the ever-shifting rooms near the end increased the film's intensity at that stage. -- BrentNewhall

I liked this movie... even though it was mathematically inconsistent and such, it was still quite suspenseful. I liked the idea of it. I also think gore makes more of an impression when comes up in such a plain environment like the rooms in the cube. If you are looking for a movie to expand your knowledge or mind, don't watch it. If you want to be entertained, definitely watch this movie.

I'm not gonna make a big fuss about the "inconsistent math" contained in the film, but I just wanted to say I loved this movie. It's hilarious how stupid the cop acts, at points his acting is a little corny. But it was a great idea for the movie. Brilliant. I just wish I knew where the hell Kazan ended up in the white light. I just saw this movie a few weeks ago. And I just recently found out there was a sequel, and I must say I am psyched to see it. That's all for now. Oh yeah, try getting baked and watching this movie. It's cool as hell. :)

I just made the mistake of renting the HyperCubeMovie?. I also rented JasonEcks?, a generation 10 sequel in the slasher movie genre set in space, in the future, with nanites. I liked JasonEcks? better. The astute reader will come to the correct conclusion regarding the quality of the HyberCubeMovie?. Renting the prequel, Cube Zero, would also be a mistake.

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