| Series note: Although Cube Zero is a prequel to a film series, this is a rare case where I'd recommend that you watch the series in the release order. The films will have maximum impact that way. Start with Cube 1997 , then Cube 2: Hypercube 2002 , then finally this film.A number of people find themselves trapped in a bizarre world consisting of cubic rooms with no windows and only a hatch-like portal in each of the four walls, the ceiling and the floor. To complicate matters, some rooms are booby-trapped and the people have lost their memories. Who are they? What is the Cube? Why are <more> the there? Can they get out? Just as another film I recently reviewed, Equilibrium 2002 , was the perfect example why I do not usually subtract points for a lack of originality, Cube Zero is the rare example where I do subtract points for that. It's not a serious problem, but it brought the film's score down.As a prequel to one of the most tightly-focused and enigmatic film series, first time director/second time Cube scripter Ernie Barbarash assigned himself an almost insurmountable challenge. The problem was this: if you give away too much of the film's world, you destroy the veiled mystique that makes the series so attractive to fans. And if you do not give away enough, you're stuck with basically repeating material from the other films.In Cube 2: Hypercube, the way Barbarash and his fellow writers and director solved this problem was by placing the story an arbitrary length of time in the future--enough of a span that a second cube had been built with much-advanced technology, with a more complex, sci-fi oriented theoretical physics/mathematics basis. They also gave us just a tease of the world "outside" the cube.Cube Zero is a prequel though, also set an arbitrary length of time before the first film--again this is a different cube. The setting doesn't allow this film to trump the other cubes in mind-bending technology we know that they _have_ to eventually make a "Cube Cubed" sequel where, like Hypercube, bizarre technology can be an attractor . But it also would not have worked to make the cube in Cube Zero significantly more primitive, as it would just seem ridiculous.So the flaw of Cube Zero became that at least initially, the cube material seems more like a remake of Cube than an extension of the mythos, and as such, it invites comparisons to Cube and slightly suffers in the process. Why? Because the handling of characters' bewilderment and subsequent partial "solving" of the puzzle was handled much more effectively in the original film. In Cube Zero our cube dwellers figure out much too quickly and easily what their predicament is and how to handle it. Surely Barbarash wrote the film that way intentionally--since the material had already been done and he's probably correctly assuming that a large percentage of the audience has already experienced the other films, he must have thought that it was obligatory material at least to explain the gist to the small amount of viewers unfamiliar with the mythos but cannot be labored over lest he start simply remaking Cube. I agree with the motivation, but the result didn't work well for me. There must have been a different way to write that material. It also didn't help that the cube character demographics and relationships had strong similarities to the first film. Although it did help that the booby-traps and effects were just as visceral.But the misstep is slight. Later on, he does very effectively extend the cube with a small "c", meaning the device itself mythos, and even better, he greatly extends the Cube the series mythos, finally taking us "outside" of the cube for extended periods. This was the best part of the film; I would have liked even more of it, and could even have gone for a film almost exclusively set in this "other" world but I agree it wasn't possible, as audience expectations must be met .The characters "outside" of the cube seem clearly to not be so outside. Barbarash puts them in a world reminiscent, as he notes, of Delicatessen 1991 , Brazil 1985 , and City of the Lost Children 1995 . It's an environment of "retro-tech", filled with bizarre devices that look like an office "garage" sale became an artificially intelligent, self-assembling erector set with a Rube Goldberg fetish. Like the cube, it's a world without windows or doors leading to an obviously external environment. Like the cube, the dwellers in this "outside" world can't remember some things and they seem to be at a loss to understand exactly what they're doing. It's important to remember that any material you see "outside" the cube may not be what is "really" going on.The performances are good to excellent. Since the "outside" stuff worked best for me, I tended to like those performances the best or maybe that should be the other way around . I especially loved Michael Riley as Jax. He is wonderfully over the top and odd, almost as engagingly perplexing as, say, Jon Voight as Paul Sarone in Anaconda 1997 .As Barbarash says in the good "making of" documentary on the disc, a lot of the film is an exploration of authority. Barbarash even directly references the infamous Stanley Milgram experiments on authority done in the early 1960s at Yale. But Barbarash also references other kinds of authority, from militaristic to religious. Members of the cast also had insightful things to say about the film's subtexts, with Richard McMillan pointing out that the cube material is like a "big mirror reflecting the characters' inner-selves or souls".However you interpret the film, it's worth watching. The more this world is explored, the more I want to see of it. Now bring us Cube Cubed! <less> |
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
