pretentious pseudo-intellectual existentialism

Rating: 6/10 (28 July 2000)

The worst thing about this movie was that I had a good idea of exactly where it was going after the first five minutes. OK, the premise is not terrible, but nor is it very original. You've got a bunch of people trapped in some kind of three-dimensional mazea - they don't know why they are there or whether they can get out. Shades of the legendary "Prisoner" TV program, or "No Exit" by Sartre. Typical existentialist themes: why are we here, what can we do, how do we solve our problems, is there any reason to have hope?
The themes are reasonable, but the execution is terrible. What one expects is a thematic pursuit about what people want to live for, some psychological exploration, etc. What we get is inconsistent character development and insulting plot twists.
My main problem with this movie is that the Worth and Quentin characters are very inconsistently drawn. In the first half of the movie, the Quentin character provides leadership qualities, getting people motivated and moving, keeping up hope, while the Worth character is moody and generally acts like a coward and an ass. Suddenly, in the middle of the movie, each undergoes a magical transformation. Worth is now the moral force behind the group, while Quentin becomes violent and rageful, ultimately reaching a state where he is a typical movie bad guy. His psychosis appears suddenly without rhyme or reason. Any hope I had for this movie went out the window when it appeared. The movie was no longer even a half-decent treatment of existentialist themes, but rather had degenerated into "watch out for the bad guy" stuff. Very disappointing.
One minor quibble: the Leaven character is somehow easily able to tell if a three-digit number is prime or not, but then is paralyzed if she has to decide whether a number is a prime power. As a professional mathematician, I have to say this plot twist is laughable. Factoring three-digit numbers is a simple trick for a mathematician of Leaven's supposed caliber. The number of prime powers less than 1000 which are not themselves prime is really quite small. One doesn't need a Rainman-type savant to solve this problem. (Had they been factoring the full 9-digit numbers, well, that would have been much more impressive.)
Ultimately, I was disappointed as the theme and the setting lent themselves to a very interesting movie. But it just didn't happen. Too bad.