A very mediocre movie that wants to be more.

Rating: 4/10 (9 December 2013)

I walked in on this while friends were watching it, just a couple of minutes in. Thus, I had no idea whether they were watching it and had never seen it, or had seen it and thought it was good or bad, or if they even realized that it was a B movie. After it was mostly over, I said that it was a bad movie, which got me the kind of looks you get when you accidentally step on a dog's tail and the yelp draws everyone's attention. Don't watch it with libertarians.
It IS a bad movie. I've seen worse, but it's bad. The production values, including the acting, are good for $300,000, but the script and its underlying ideas make up its real purpose. It is philosophical in the sense of basically ripping the basics of post-Enlightenment humanism out of the most clichéd characters and faux-sophisticated dialogue possible. The script is the point. And the script is pretty bad.
The lead guy, the one who starts off as the ringleader and driver of the action, must eventually turn out to be an insane, violent pederast simply because he's not a whimpering moron with a singular function or a strident bleeding heart; his transformation represents the throwing off of authoritarian shackles by the good and virtuous people following the birth of the age of reason. The perspective makes itself more clear with the explanation for the existence of the cube: it has no purpose, no driver, just an accident of power that traps people. The ending shows the one remaining character stepping into a pure light of nothingness, and that's about the size of it. It's humanitarian nihilism on film. Judging by the ratings and comments on it here, that qualifies as deep psychology to the typical moviegoer.
The handful of surprises in the movie revolve around the room design, with its Hollywood Standard methods of killing people like acid and blades, and a strangely convoluted explanation of how a three-axis coordinate system works. The novelty of these parts, along with the bare adequacy of the production values when handicapped for a B grade budget, get the film four out of ten, maybe four and a half. But let's be clear: it's a bad movie. I can actually enjoy a pointless movie, but movies which think they have a point, then fail to make it, are far worse. And for Christ's sake, do NOT watch this with libertarians. Probably not liberals, either. It's one of those films that makes people think that it vindicates their worldview, no matter what that worldview is.