Great Set but melodramatic

Rating: Null/10 (31 May 1999)

This low cost, Sci fi, high tech, lowly acted, Canadian psychological and mathematical thriller with a great set, offers plenty from the shorts for the slice and dice fans. The film begins with a fellow stepping into a room and being literally sliced by razor wire into cubes, sliced and diced. Horror fans will like the look of that! But Cube will leave you wondering.
Wondering what? A group of Canadians wake up in a deadly prison which consists of a series of cubes with a door in the middle of each of the six walls. There are strange metallic rumblings every few minutes and certain death waits if they do nothing.
Step through the wrong door and they're likely to die a horrible if quick death. But step through doors they must or they will die from thirst. Or much worse, they will have to suffer from being stuck with the others, none of whom you would pick to retire with to a tropical island. But why are they there in the first place? Kafka's monstrous bug and Orwell's 1984 springs to mind.
Cube is full of desperate musings on who would have built this monstrous prison. "Only the government could have built something this ugly" is a memorable line. But don't look for anything too thoughtful in Cube even if getting out of the maze eventually becomes a mathematical puzzle, which progressively becomes ethereal enough to isolate the drama even further from most movie goers.
And even my poor maths could pick holes in the numbers. It doesn't take much math to know that an even number can never be prime, but suddenly producing a Rain Man style autistic savant was a bit rich!
The film is left to hinge only on its set which is strong but the rest, the most important bits, the characters, have been dealt with very poorly. Who cares who survives?
This sort of psychological drama is a classic Hitchcock, marooned in a lifeboat scenario. Claustrophobia, isolation and fear is a terrific recipe for drama but then it's handy if there are characters with depth, a director with ability and actors who can act. I suspect that Alfred would have made much more of his characters if he had got hold of this script.
The doctor, the criminal, the bureaucrat, the student, the cop and assorted others are ineffectively handled. They never rise beyond being shadows of personalities and the drama becomes progressively melodramatic.
Why were they put in the cube? Perhaps they deserved it. After a while we would wonder if any of them are worth saving anyway, especially if they live in a community that would build such a thing as the Cube. But hey, that's just nasty. (The Cube became pretty boring at times, encouraging those sorts of ideas. )
But still Cube is memorable, if only for the total set, the total cube when it is finally revealed. It's just a shame that you are never encouraged to become caring about the characters.
And then there's the ending, which is a total cop out unless you believe that there is no meaning, for anything. Then you will leave the theatre suitably perplexed.