`It restores your faith in science fiction to see a movie as original and successful as this'

Rating: 8/10 (21 October 2003)

Ignore the title, I was being sarcastic.
If this were the movie that restores faith in science fiction, I'd hate to have to watch the film that took the faith away. (It was probably The Matrix..)
`Six strangers awaken from their daily lives to find themselves trapped in a surreal prison' No, no, no, this is all screwed up. I think what they meant was `Six terrible actors wake up in what looks like a set from a low budget 80's Sci Fi Star Trek wannabe filled with very unimaginative traps and a whole host of other crapness'
The whole film takes place in `The cube', that fact gives the film a crappy low budget edge right from the offset. The first scene depicts a man in a room, getting sliced and diced by what looks like a big metal cargo net or something. Sound good? Forget it, I never thought I'd say this but, Resident Evil did the laser scene better. The movie then moves on to the main characters meeting each other, and within about ten minutes another one is on the floor, this time it was an acid thing that burnt his face off. At this point I thought the movie was looking up, I mean 2 deaths in ten minutes? Surely all the rest of them are going to die in shocking and exotic ways..
A film such as this is a playground for great set piece death scenes, every room could hold a new secret, a new grizzly and gruesome death, what a wasted opportunity.
Which brings me to the script, the word `rubbish' just doesn't do it justice, there are lots of words I could use, mediocre, silly, unbelievable, ridiculous etc but none of them are mean enough. Seriously, we need a new word to describe the script, when you've got characters saying, `look! It's the Renne', you know something is wrong.
Now, the Japanese may like films where nothing is explained, but guess what? I don't. Where did the cube come from? Why were those people put in it? Where is it? How come this film sucks so much? So many questions.the characters throw a few theories around, such as `The government built it' `Aliens!' `It was an independent person', `the baddie from a James Bond film made it' (no, I didn't just make that one up) But what does that prove? Nothing.
This film tries to be clever, with its underlying `morality' theme, apparently the cube is an extreme of life, being forced to interact with others that you don't necessarily want to interact with in a hostile environment, this is shown by the paranoia the characters fall into due to their situation, well actually one character feels the effects, and he just turns into a stupid lunatic that ends up wasting two potential death scenes. Morality and metaphorical issues? No thanks, lets have a good film instead.
Which brings me to the ending, I can imagine the directors sat there now `come on, hurry up, my dinner's nearly ready, just throw anything together and lets get it shipped out!' The ending is a close contender for the worst of all time, up there with The fast and the furious. I mean anti climatic is an understatement, and the only likable character (the maths wiz) got killed and the worst character (the retard) survived! What were they thinking? Well, actually we don't even know if he did survive, as all he did was walk into a big white blur.
In short, do yourself a favour and give it a miss. If they had a few more ideas than just spikes and acid, it could have been great. The idea is there, but it suffered from poor execution. This is one film I would like to see remade.