Horror Movie with Good Art Direction

Rating: 6/10 (13 September 2009)

Vincenzo Natali's Cube is a formulaic horror movie playing with the famous premise of getting strangers in a mysterious situation and see how they interact. It's Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (I wanted to use the original title, but sadly IMDb believes in censoring certain words). Except instead of a mysterious man killing people who got away clean with murder, we have a mysterious cube killing people for no apparent reason.
This pointlessness and randomness seems to be an element of high rating for its fans. It seems people like pointless movies more than I imagined. The complete indeterminacy (we're far beyond the level of ambiguity here) of the nature of the cube has generated more theories than the 17,000 cube rooms that constitute the Cube.
The Cube is just a well-paced, suspenseful horror thriller with an art direction better than most horror movies (with the possible exception of Dario Argento's colorful '70s movies). I marvelled at the design of the cube room, its deadly traps and the shots of the outer shell.
The characters are just one-dimensional figures going wherever the plot require them to go. Too many clichés abound, especially the one I most despise - the bad guy who seems dead but returns for one last scare.
As an exercise in keeping the viewer on edge, this movie wins. Otherwise it's a one-time-only experience.