Blunt and badly delivered

Rating: 5/10 (22 June 2015)

Cube is one of the movies that brag being not what they seem. This sure is true, because one has to be insane to take a movie with such a bizarre and contrived setting at face value.
And of course it's a metaphor. At least it's what the creators of Cube wanted to think they were making. When you do something utterly unrealistic and make your characters behave in the most unlikely and unnatural way imaginable, you must believe you're conveying some sort of a message via those acts.
Unfortunately, the director and the screenwriter seem to forget what a metaphor is. Metaphor is a second layer, concealed and subtle, of anything that is still rather believable, albeit shallow, on the surface. You can't simply blurt out some message you consider important out of the blue and think it adds artistic value to your product. But here, this is exactly what happens. If the movie wants to make an allegory of society as a giant machine in which people are just little cogs, it does no more than just make one of the characters say something like "we're nothing but cogs spinning in this huge machine". If it wants to claim that life is a headless beast with no mastermind but human stupidity, it also bluntly says it out loud. That's not a metaphor, and it's definitely not art. It's just ravings of a madman, which can be enlightening to some who are desperate to find a hidden meaning in everything, but are still more or less a pointless nonsense if observed on a long run.
But the script is not the only weak point of this movie. The acting which starts as just blah, goes to laughable to hysterical to preposterous. Obviously, in a movie that views itself as a naked metaphor, the characters are all but walking archetypes, but, with the delirious approach the film has taken, they are hardly more than caricatures of the types they were supposed to enact. And that is really sad, because no matter how much promise your idea shows, when it's delivered that bad one is only left to shrug and wonder on what drugs the film makers were.
Still, Cube undeniably has at least one true virtue. Which is to be an example for the new and aspiring cinema artists of what can happen when you take a promising premise and screw it up with a bland and uninspiring implementation.