Talk:Cube (1997 film)

message: Anyone else reminded of Portal with this movie or vice-versa?  Obviously there's no portals in it but they both feature people kidnapped and put through some kind of mysterious test underground against their will.  May or may not factor into the article, but I wouldn't be suprised if The Cube didn't influence Portal in some way.75.141.234.236 (talk) 07:44, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes this does remind me of portal but please do not use the Wikipedia discussion page to talk about it. This page was meant to be used to discuss possible changes to the article.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ross817 (talk • contribs) 21:13, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Portal 

message: Added notes on the two sequels that they should be merged with this one.  Cube Zero has an excellent synopsis of all three movies.   Zerbey 19:00, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: This article has a synopsis of the first movie. Cube Zero perhaps should be moved to Cube (trilogy) or something, since the first movie was never called "Cube Zero". Dysprosia 00:44, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  I've created a new Cube series article that has the summaries of all three movies.  I went with that name instead because of the naming of The Matrix series article. -- Bovineone 07:26, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge summary of other movies 

message: No discussion of the allegorical significance that the Cube was deisgned by its victims, so added: "However, Worth's role as being a designer of the cube system albeit without any real knowledge of the task he had been working on, other than it was a 'good job' at the time, and his argument against the conspiracy theory of Holloway, argues for the film's allegorical point being that we are all trapped in a device of our own making, which was made in ignorance, and ultimately meaningless, however complex and intricate at may appear."
User:User
* The character Worth claims he worked on the outer part and no one involved on the project  knew anything about the overall purpose of the rooms in the cube. Of course he could simply have been driven mad as happened to Quentin in the course of the movie. The movie is a perfect analog of a bureaucracy gone amok. Franz Kafka would have been proud. There is no explained purpose in the movie, and it works best as a complete mystery: the explanations in the sequal and prequel fall flat. In Cube all we know is the people are in a maze, with traps and few clues, but must survive by their wits and grudging cooperation. To be encyclopediac, there is no real purpose given in the movie, but in the end it is ironic that only the idiot survives. For talk purposes, if I had to surmise, the cube started as a top secret secure weapons storage depot, automated; when the project was canceled, the cube went on automatically and no one outside knew enough about the project to have an overview of what they had created and abandoned (par for gov't work). It also reminds me of the Algis Budrys novel Rogue Moon. q.v. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Moon Naaman Brown (talk) 00:08, 18 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Purpose of the Cube

message: This article needs some serious work, in almost every section. I think there should be a section about the Allegorical Meaning of the cube, as well as much more cohesive Maths section. I say this because I think Cube is a excellent film and it deserves a better article than this. Satchfan 08:14, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There should certainly NOT contain a section about allegorical meanings, as that would constitute original research. Surely the film has a fan site where discussions of that nature are appropriate and encouraged.Vonbontee (talk) 07:49, 16 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clean Up 

message: You have to add the extra legnth from when you go into the door which is roughly a foot and a half. That is how the external dimensions are 15.5 feet.
But that's still wrong. That's an extra 1.5 feet on the other side of the cube. You forgot that each door has an opposite door on the other side, so that would add another 1.5 feet to the exterior lenght of one of cubes; 
The Math: 14ft (interior) + 1.5ft (doorway) + 1.5ft (opposite doorway) = 17ft^3 (exterior)
That is, of course, assuming that the lenght of doorway on a cube is 1.5ft. I actually think it's 2ft, but that's just me.--24.89.215.104 04:22, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: However, you have to account for the fact that two adjaccent rooms share their common "hallway", i.e. every room only contributes one half, making the hallway 2.69 ft long, which is, IMHO, not too different from the length perceived when watching the movie.
Umm...the "hallway" lenght was already stated. --24.89.215.104 00:27, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Rooms

message: is it? How do we know this?
--Charlesknight 22:53, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Post-apocalyptic science fiction film 

message: Holloway, San Quentin and Leavenworth are known to me, but Kazan and Rennes? The latter's known to me as one of the former national capital of Britanny, and the other for its university where Tolstoy went. Can someone provide ref.s for the prisons in these places and how notable they are please? --MacRusgail (talk) 19:14, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Kazan and Rennes 

message: The article claimed the math was all valid but it has some holes.  Also, people think trapped rooms are marked by prime powers, they're not, Leaven was saying they're involved; the trapped rooms are those in which any of the number of prime factors of the marked numbers it not a power of a prime (check the film carefully).  I believe Leaven's claim of using the subtractions to figure out how the rooms rearrange is impossible, but I'm not sure so I can't comment on it.  70 bags of gumdrops if you can figure out what the theory is!
I've checked the film carefully, and Leaven's exact words are, "they're identified by numbers that are the power of a prime." That means trapped rooms are identified by prime powers, so the article is correct in its current form.  Tiggerdude (talk) 15:38, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Math Corrections 

message: Ok, so I revised the math to only include the bare facts, without mathematical interpretation.  I tried to take everyone's comments on what facts should be included into account including Wikiscient's list and some facts I think were left out, while including none of our personal feelings or extended personal commentary--whether opinion or solid mathematical consequence of the facts revealed--such as my own theory of the system, concluding the full system is never fully revealed and the audience should induce this on their own.  Please correct this if you think I've left anything important out, got anything wrong, or inadvertently inserted some type of opinion somewhere.  (Does this work?)
I still think it would be quite interesting to debate and theorize this math with people, and would be delighted if someone were to second my proof of what marks a trapped room--that a room is trapped if "any of the numbers of prime factors of the three digit room numbers is not a prime power"--or would love to read some professional thesis if someone with a math phD were ever bored enough, but I won't hold my breath for any of those =).  I think it's absolutely brilliant and quite complex, and I'm still baffled that as far as I know, there are no professional interpretations of this movie.
-Squish (squish7.com/cube)
Squish7 (talk) 23:45, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removal of personal interpretations 

message: This is partly (continuing) discussion about the movie, but only to approach harmony with our arguments over what to put in the article.  This has been kind of a rare bird as the math is incredibly baffling, and people look up the movie to have it explained, yet there's nothing to reference I know of that's covered it.  Anyway I'm clearing up an old debate, I hope this helps.  On the bright side, our discussion page has become the leading Cube Math publication in the world^.  [^According to this paragraph.]
After dealing with a ton of image/fractal math (i.e. rendering for efficient scaling to two image resolutions by multiplying shared factors by non-shared), and speaking with an engineer yesterday about various topics, I came back to this debate.  I stated way back that I thought I'd come up with the simplest explanation of what marks a trapped room, and kept asking people to come up with a simpler one, thinking the simplest theory should be stated.  For instance: if someone says "2, 4, and 8 are nifty numbers", one may speculate various things: A) Numbers below 10 are nifty, B) Powers of 2 are nifty, C) All numbers are nifty.  We couldn't resolve the argument, so we just left it at the absolute basic facts, with minimal interpretation.
Reading the current article, I was shocked to read that there was an "error" in the film.  I checked, and realized that this, too, is an interpretation.  I.e. "384" swings onto the screen preceding a shot of Kazaan saying "one", but this could be meant to symbolize transition, not the number Kazaan is looking at in the next shot, as there are a lot of quick cuts throughout the movie to get the feel of the various things that are happening.  So, I reworded the "error" to be only a potential one, which should be noted, as it's screwy enough to have generated the whole earlier debate.  To clear it up quick for anyone with PTSD on the matter...
People kept saying that trapped rooms are marked with prime powers.  I believe I discarded this due to this "384" pan, as it's not a prime power, yet seems to be the number used to decide the room is trapped (if it carries over).  The main interpretation discarded, I came up with what I still believe to be the next simplest theory: That a room is trapped if the number of prime factors of any of the room numbers is NOT a power of a prime.  ("Identified by prime powers", when "prime powers" is a collective noun, could mean "identified by [a system utilizing] prime powers".  This is perhaps a less simple grammatical consequence, but I had to come up with a second theory if that number carried over.)
The bizarre thing is that both theories simultaneously still fit all the facts of the film (barring the 384 thing which my system would bypass).  That is, that 2, 3, 4, & 5 are safe factors, and 1 is a trapped factor.  They would conflict for "6" however, but a room is not revealed with 6 factors, hence as is, my theory is still correct, though I agree that 384 is probably a non sequitur transition (or error) now that it's been pointed out, making the main interpretation appropriate. Squish7 (talk) 13:33, 3 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Occam's Razor Cubed 

message: I just watched this movie on Amazon, and I watched the ending twice to be sure.  After Kazan walks into the white light, the movie ends.  This never happened:
"Then the camera pans back to the room where Joan dies. She twitches and murmurs something about the cube being a triangle by logarithmic trigonometrical calculus, and the film ends in a flash of white."
If there is an alternate or extended ending to the movie, it needs to be identified as such, doesn't it?
76.104.85.67 (talk) 03:02, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. Until a source can be provided stating that such an alternate ending exists, it should be removed. I own a DVD of this movie and at least that DVD does not contain such an ending. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 10:29, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Who the hell is Joan anyway?  There wasn't a character named Joan. Squish7 (talk) 08:47, 6 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Problem with the ending 

message: I've removed the following section, as it is completely uncited:
::Character names
:::All the characters are named after prisons:
:::Quentin - San Quentin State Prison, California
:::Holloway - Holloway Prison in London
:::Kazan - the prison in Kazan, Russia
:::Rennes - a prison in Rennes, France
:::Alderson - Alderson Federal Prison Camp, Alderson, West Virginia
:::Leaven and Worth - United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth, Leavenworth, Kansas.
After all, just about anyone is named for a prison. My own "surname" here, Sebastian, could correspond with San Sebastian Prison in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The point is, we as editors cannot make the observation; it must be a reliable, verifiable and notable source that makes that connection. - Jack Sebastian (talk) 17:19, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Names being prisons 

message: I've posted a message similar to this over on the talk page for Nicole de Boer.
On her filmography, her role in Cube is listed as Joan Leaven.  I've watched the film 3 times in the last few days (and many, many times before that) and have NEVER seen or heard any reference to the first name Joan.  I've searched the internet for any concrete evidence, and while nearly every site uses Joan Leaven there's absolutely no evidence to explain where it comes from.  However, I'm willing to admit that perhaps it was mentioned in the film and fell under my radar; my point is not to debate the use of Joan, only to point out that there ought to be consistency between the Cube article and the filmography of Nicole de Boer's page.  Patrick of J (talk) 00:15, 26 June 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Joan Leaven? 

message: Feels like it's worth mentioning that Cube is a reworking of the Twilight Zone episode Five Characters in Search of an Exit.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dmillman (talk • contribs) 16:34, 9 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cube is a reworking of a Twilight Zone episode