CUBE is always unsettling, often terrifying

Rating: Null/10 (6 January 2003)

This movie is not fun. The picture it paints of humanity is very dark, ugly, and disturbing. But it contains far too many elements of truth to be dismissed. This is one of the very few movies ever to give me insomnia. I was badly shaken.
CUBE's plot is simple. A handful of strangers wake up inside a strange machine, a sort of maze consisting of 14-foot cubical rooms, some of which contain deadly, sadistic traps. They have no idea how they came here, or what the place is for. The story is simply of their efforts to survive and escape from the maze. But a darker story is told simultaneously, as the growing tension and strain strip away the veneer of each character to expose what lies below. A character who initially appears useless and annoying turns out to have hidden courage; a character who at first seems heroic is revealed to be anything but.
The tragedy of CUBE is the energy the characters spend in conflict with each other when they so clearly need to work together to overcome the daunting obstacles of the maze. The mismatched-partners concept is old, of course, but in most movies it is played for humor; in CUBE, it is shown as deadly. The story is a microcosm of the human predicament. Humans understand what they are doing in this world little (if any) better than the characters understand what they are doing in the Cube. Our planet is full of dangers that can and eventually do kill every one of us, just as the Cube is. Yet, humans the world over continue to fight each other instead of cooperating to understand and overcome the problems the world throws at us. That behavior is so routine that most of us have long since ceased to notice it or think it odd; by showing it in miniature, CUBE puts the absurdity of our actions in sharp focus.
Another foolish human habit exposed by CUBE is the characters' tendency to reason from inadequate evidence to whatever conclusion fits their preconceived notions, a failing which proves as dangerous in the movie as it does in real life.
The criticisms you have read about CUBE's mathematical implausibilities are true. They certainly make the movie imperfect, but I don't see how they can be regarded as ruining it. At any rate, CUBE presents one mathematical statement that brooks no argument (and here there is a SPOILER). The Cube is one of the ghastliest, cruelest killing machines ever conceived, and yet when the carnage is totaled up at the end of the story, the score is: Humans 4, Cube 2.