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It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movie

Reader Review


Cube

Posted by: Mark Green
Date Submitted: Thursday, October 26, 2000 at 04:35:55
Date Posted: Wednesday, December 13, 2000 at 07:47:30

I was delighted to see that a review of the film has been added to the site. I feel obliged to add a few choice bits that the original reviewer didn't mention:

First, it's blindingly obvious that every single room in the cube is the same set with different lighting. This film must have had a budget of approximiately nil.

There are actually TWO people killed by traps in the film: there's a random guy killed in the opening sequence. The way he dies sets the tone for the rest of the film. He walks between three random rooms, then there's a weird noise, and suddenly lines of blood start to streak backwards from the front of his face, and he falls apart into cubes of flesh (eewww). We then pan towards the FRONT of him, where we see the wire grid that was responsible, which clangs as it folds up into the ceiling.

HUH!? If it's just passed over him, how can it still be in FRONT of him? And when it's so big and makes a huge noise when it folds up, how the heck did he not notice it? And how could he possibly be cut into cubes? A grid can't cut in the third dimension.

The other traps are just like this. They aren't creative gadgety-type traps; you just go in a room, and something sees you, and you die -- standard cheesy stuff like incinerators and acid sprays.

The skill of the guy who's "really good at getting past traps" can be summed up succinctly. He knows to throw his boot into a room before entering it. He dies because he tries to use this on a trap with a heat sensor. Obviously he's not THAT good at getting past traps.

The rules dictating the traps DO change. Initially it's prime numbers on the signs; then it's POWERS of a prime. Strange how they managed to avoid all the rooms using that code until very late in the film.

The final nail in the coffin is that when they find the rooms are moving, they find out how to tell where they move (something about adding together the numbers on the signs in three different ways to give three different sets of coordinates), and then they realize that the one room that eventually moves outside the cube is THE ROOM THEY STARTED IN. And thus the entire endeavour -- the entire film in fact -- was pointless.


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