NOT Ellison's story...much, much older

Rating: Null/10 (11 April 2003)

Sorry to the guy who commented that `Cube' is based on the famous Harlan Ellison story `I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream', but it ain't so, my friend. (The fact that the pugnacious Ellison did not sue, as he did the producers of `The Terminator' for ripping off his OUTER LIMITS episode `Soldier', is proof enough of that. He won that case, by the way.) This movie is obviously an update of the Greek myth of the Labyrinth and a brilliant one at that (far more so than Clint Eastwood's over-obvious `Space Cowboys'). `I Have No MouthÂ…' bears great resemblance to that classic story as well, but Ellison's point was different, much more about high technology reflecting our own self-hatred than the complex thematic web spun by the makers of `Cube'.
For those not in the know, the myth goes like this: King Minos commissioned the great inventor Daedalus to build an unsolvable maze for his amusement. Upon completion, Minos imprisoned Daedalus in the Labyrinth so he couldn't reveal the solution to anyone and threw in the inventor's son Icarus for good measure. There they were stalked by the Minotaur, a deadly half-man/half-bull predator. Daedalus cleverly constructed wings for them to fly out of the Labyrinth, but tragically, Icarus, in his hubris, flew too close to the sun which melted the glue holding his wings together, causing a great fall to his death. An astonishing and deservedly enduring comment on the responsibility of the ingenious.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!
In "Cube", the Canadian government (King Minos) awards contracts to various engineering firms (Daedalus) to build a damn-near-unsolvable, three-dimensional, changing maze (the Labyrinth), ostensibly as some sort of defense (though admittedly, that's the sole weakness in the concept; whaddya do, drop a cube on Iraq and wait for Saddam's whole regime to wander in?). Upon completion, one of the cube's builders and many innocents (Icarus) are imprisoned therein where they are endangered and killed, one by one, by insidious death traps (the Minotaur). The clever mathematician figures a way out, but as in the myth, only one survives.
But just as this maze twists and turns and reorganizes itself like a Rubik's Cube, this movie twists and turns and reorganizes the symbology of the myth. It is the autistic man, not the brilliant man, who survives. Additionally, one of the original "Icarus"s, the angry cop, becomes a latent "Minotaur" himself, putting a fine point on the film's theme: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." In the contemporary ambiguous world, EACH of us is Minos AND Daedalus AND the Minotaur AND Icarus.
So, finally, the cube becomes an allegory of the social labyrinth we moderns have constructed. Through some elliptical course or another, we are all guilty, and we are all victims.