Cube (film)

Cube
Theatrical release poster
Directed by Vincenzo Natali
Produced by
  • Mehra Meh
  • Betty Orr[1]
Written by
Starring
Music by Mark Korven[1]
Cinematography Derek Rogers[1]
Edited by John Sanders[1]
Production
company
Distributed by Trimark Pictures
Release date
Running time
 90 minutes
Country Canada
Language English
Budget $350,000[2]
Box office $565,727[3]

Cube is a 1997 Canadian science-fiction horror film directed and co-written by Vincenzo Natali.[4] A product of the Canadian Film Centre's First Feature Project,[5] the film follows a group of people as they cross industrialized cube-shaped rooms, some rigged with various traps designed to kill.

Cube has gained notoriety and a cult following, for its surreal atmosphere and Kafkaesque setting and concept of industrial, cube-shaped rooms. The film received polarizing reviews, and was followed by two sequels. A remake is in development at Lionsgate.[6]

Plot

After a man named Alderson dies in a mysterious cube-shaped room, five people – Quentin, Worth, Holloway, Rennes, and Leaven – meet in another room. None know where they are or how they got there. Quentin informs the others that some rooms contain traps, which he learned by nearly being killed. Rennes assumes each trap is triggered by a motion detector and tests each room by throwing one of his boots in first. Leaven notices numbers inscribed in the passageways between rooms. Quentin recognizes Rennes as "The Wren", a convict who has escaped from seven prisons. After declaring one room trap-free, Rennes enters and is killed when he is sprayed with acid. The others realize that there are different kinds of detectors, and Quentin deduces that this trap was triggered by heat.

Quentin believes each person has a reason for being there. He is a police officer, Leaven a mathematics student, Holloway a physician and conspiracy theorist, and the surly Worth declines to talk about himself. Leaven hypothesizes that any room marked with a prime number is a trap. They find a mentally challenged man named Kazan, whom Holloway insists they bring along. When Quentin injures his leg in a room deemed safe by Leaven's calculations, tensions rise due to personality conflicts and lack of faith in Leaven's system. Quentin provokes Worth into an argument about finding the exit, and Worth accidentally reveals that he has knowledge of the Cube. Worth admits that he designed the Cube's outer shell for a shadowy bureaucracy and guesses that its original purpose has been forgotten; they have been imprisoned within simply to put it to use.

Worth's knowledge of the outer shell's size allows Leaven to determine that each side of the Cube is 26 rooms across and that there are 17,576 rooms in total. She guesses that the numbers indicate the Cartesian coordinates of the rooms. The group moves toward the nearest edge as determined by her theory, but each of the rooms near the outer wall is trapped. Rather than backtrack, they travel silently through a room with a sound-activated trap. After Kazan makes a sound and nearly causes Quentin's death, Quentin threatens Kazan. Holloway defends Kazan and provokes Quentin into an argument by calling him a Nazi. The acrimonious argument escalates until Quentin slaps her, further increasing tension within the group. When they reach the edge, Holloway scouts the gap between the Cube and its outer shell but slips during a violent quake; Quentin initially saves her but then lets her fall to her death. He reports it to the others as an accident.

Quentin attempts to persuade Leaven to abandon the others with him and makes a sexual advance, but she rejects him. When Quentin becomes aggressive, Worth intervenes; Quentin beats him savagely and drops him through a floor hatch. Worth laughs hysterically at what he finds — Rennes's corpse. The group is demoralized by the thought of having been wandering in circles. Worth realizes that the rooms move periodically through the Cube, and this is the source of the quaking. Leaven deduces that traps are not tagged by prime numbers, but by powers of prime numbers. Much to Quentin's surprise, Kazan reveals himself to be an autistic savant[7] who can quickly do prime factorizations mentally. With Kazan's help, Leaven guides them to a bridge room which will lead them out of the maze in two movements. Worth preemptively ambushes Quentin and leaves him behind. Kazan opens the supposed final door, revealing a bright white light, but Worth declines to leave the Cube, as he has lost faith in humanity.

Leaven objects and attempts to convince Worth to join her, but Quentin reappears, kills her, and mortally wounds Worth. As Quentin moves to kill Kazan, Worth expends the last of his strength to grab Quentin's leg, pinning him in the passageway as the rooms shift again. Quentin is torn apart, and Worth crawls back to Leaven's corpse and dies next to her. Kazan slowly walks into the bright light, his ultimate fate unknown.

Cast

Each character's name is connected with a real-world prison:

Name Occupation Gender Prison Connection Played by
Kazan Unknown (Possibly none) Male Kazan Prison (Russia) Andrew Miller
David Worth Architect Male Leavenworth Prison (US) David Hewlett
Quentin McNeil Police officer Male San Quentin State Prison (US) Maurice Dean Wint
Joan Leaven Mathematics student Female Leavenworth Prison (US) Nicole de Boer
Dr. Helen Holloway Free clinic doctor Female Holloway Women's Prison (UK) Nicky Guadagni
Rennes Prison escapist Male Centre pénitentiaire de Rennes (France) Wayne Robson
Alderson Unknown Male Alderson Federal Prison Camp (US) Julian Richings

Production

An episode of the original The Twilight Zone television series, "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" (first aired 22 December 1961), was reportedly an inspiration for the film.[8][9][10]

Script development

Though Vincenzo Natali had the initial inspiration to make a film "set entirely in hell" in 1990, it was not until 1994, when he was working as a storyboard artist's assistant at Canada's Nelvana animation studio, that he had completed the first script for Cube. The initial draft had a slightly comedic tone to it, and featured surreal images, a cannibal, edible moss that grew on the walls, and a monster that roamed the cube. Roommate and childhood filmmaking partner Andre Bijelic helped Natali strip the central idea – people avoiding deadly traps in a maze – down to its essence. Scenes that took place outside of the cube were jettisoned, and the identity of the victims themselves changed. In some drafts, they were accountants and in others criminals, with the implication being that their banishment to the cube was part of a penal sentence. One of the most important dramatic changes was the complete removal of food and water from the scenario; this created a sense of urgency for escape.[11]

After writing Cube, Natali developed and filmed a short entitled Elevated. The short was set in an elevator and was intended to give investors an idea of how Cube would hypothetically look and come across. While working on Elevated, cinematographer Derek Rogers developed strategies for shooting in the tightly confined spaces in which he would later work on Cube. The short eventually helped Cube procure financing. Cube was shot on a Toronto soundstage.[12]

The Cube design

The fictional Cube device in the film was conceived by David W. Pravica, a mathematician. It consists of an outer cubical shell (the sarcophagus) and the inner cube. One side of the outer shell is 434 feet long. The inner cube consists of 263 = 17,576 cubical rooms (minus an unknown number of rooms to allow for movement, as shown in the film), each having a sidelength of 15.5 feet. There is a space of 15.5 feet between the cube and the shell. Each room is labelled with three identification numbers, for example, 517 478 565. These numbers encode the starting coordinates of the room and the x, y, and z coordinates are the sums of the digits of the first, second, and third number, respectively. The numbers also determine the movement of the room, and the subsequent positions are obtained by cyclically subtracting the digits from one another. The resulting numbers are then successively added to the starting numbers.[13]

Only one cube, measuring 14 by 14 by 14 feet, was actually built, with only one working door that could actually support the weight of the actors. The color of the room was changed by sliding panels.[14] Since this was a time-consuming procedure, the movie was not shot in sequence; all shots taking place in rooms of a specific colour were shot one at a time. It was intended that there would be six different colours of rooms to match the recurring theme of six throughout the movie; five sets of gel panels, plus pure white. However, the budget did not stretch to the sixth gel panel, and so there are only five different room colours in the movie. Another partial cube was made for shots requiring the point of view of standing in one room, looking into another.[15]

Release

Cube was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival on 9 September 1997.[1] It was released in Ottawa and Montreal on 18 September 1997.[1]

Reception

The film won the award for Best Canadian First Feature Film at the 1997 Toronto International Film Festival; and the Silver Raven at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film.

Cube polarised critics, with many highly positive reviews against negative, earning an overall approval rating of 62% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 37 reviews, with a weighted average score of 6.3/10.[16] On Metacritic, the film has a score 61 out of 100, based on 12 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[17] Critics for Electric Sheep magazine and Empire Online gave the film positive reviews,[18][19] while critics for Nitrate Online and the San Francisco Chronicle panned it.[20][14]

Critics favored the film's direction, and the artistic design of its sets. Bloody Disgusting gave the movie a positive review, writing, "Shoddy acting and a semi-weak script can't hold this movie back. It's simply too good a premise and too well-directed to let minor hindrances derail its creepy premise."[21]

Nick Schager, a reviewer for Slant Magazine, said, "The struggle to discern the cube's purpose increasingly takes on prominence in the frazzled crew's search for answers, but Natali's film is infinitely more competent at creating a clever situation than positing any sort of semi-logical explanation." Slant mostly panned the film, concluding that "like lab rats futilely running on their treadmill, Cube eventually winds up going nowhere fast."[22]

The New York Times had a more positive reviewer in critic Anita Gates, who wrote, "Cube, the story in question, proves surprisingly gripping, in the best Twilight Zone tradition. The ensemble cast does an outstanding job on the cinematic equivalent of a bare stage... Everyone has his or her own theory about who is behind this peculiar imprisonment... The weakness in Cube is the dialogue, which sometimes turns remarkably trite... The strength is the film's understated but real tension. Vincenzo Natali, the film's fledgling director and co-writer, has delivered an allegory, too, about futility, about the necessity and certain betrayal of trust, about human beings who do not for a second have the luxury of doing nothing."[4]

Sequels

After Cube achieved cult status, it was followed by a sequel, Cube 2: Hypercube, released in 2002,[23] and a prequel, Cube Zero, released in 2004.[24]

Remake

In April 2015, The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Lionsgate Films was planning to remake the film, under the title Cubed.[25][26]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Cube". Collections Canada. Retrieved 16 February 2018.
  2. ↑ Kornits, Dov (8 May 1999). "eFilmCritic – Director, Vincenzo Natali – Cube". eFilmcritic.com. Retrieved 17 September 2012.
  3. ↑ "Cube (1998) – Box Office Mojo". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 17 September 2012.
  4. 1 2 Gates, Anita (11 September 1998). "Cube (1997) FILM REVIEW; No Maps, Compasses Or Faith". The New York Times.
  5. ↑ "The Canadian Film Centre :: Our Projects". cfccreates.com. Retrieved 17 September 2012.
  6. ↑ "'Cube' Reboot 'Cubed' Being Developed by Lionsgate". Screen Rant. 2015-04-30. Retrieved 2017-05-27.
  7. ↑ Armstrong, Derek. "Cube review". AllMovie. Retrieved 12 June 2017. The wild card in the equation, as if there needed to be one, is Andrew Miller's autistic man.
  8. ↑ Van Fleet, James (3 October 2013). "HALLOWEEN: The Best Twilight Zone Movies - 12: "Five Characters..." / Cube". Horror Films 101. Retrieved 23 May 2014. Imagine being dropped in an empty room. There's no exit... or if there is, the means of getting out are unknown. Imagine not being sure why you're there. Is there a purpose, or are you just being toyed with? Very quickly you learn about the people stuck with you. Very quickly the room becomes a prison... Five Characters In Search of an Exit has the benefit of brevity, but it also has an engaging episode-long "argument" between the gung-ho Major and the depressed Clown. Cube ... carries the same claustrophobia and mystery, and it amps up the potent allegory even further, becoming a microcosm of human existence. The characters define their identity, bring their talents to the problems at hand, and their environment - like the world - is as inscrutable as it is deadly.
  9. ↑ Eggert, Brian (19 May 2010). "Cube (1998)". Deep Focus Review. Retrieved 23 May 2014. Vincenzo Natali's Cube extends a scenario seemingly straight from The Twilight Zone for the duration of a full-length feature... filled with sharp ideas and a setup worthy of Franz Kafka..."
  10. ↑ Blake, Marc; Bailey, Sara (2013). Writing the Horror Movie. London ; New York: Bloomsbury. p. 137. Cube (1997) was reportedly influenced by a Twilight Zone episode, Five Characters in Search of an Exit, written by its creator Rod Serling.
  11. ↑ Berman, A.S. (2018). Cube: Inside the Making of a Cult Film Classic. https://www.amazon.com/Cube-Inside-Making-Cult-Classic/dp/1629332917: BearManor Media. pp. 25–27, pp. 47–51. ISBN 978-1629332918.
  12. ↑ "CBC.ca". CBC.ca. 2005-11-15. Archived from the original on 2006-02-11. Retrieved 2011-02-21.
  13. ↑ Polster, Burkard; Ross, Marty (2012). "6 Escape from the Cube". Math Goes to the Movies. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 85–96. ISBN 978-1-4214-0484-4.
  14. 1 2 Graham, Bob (20 November 1998). "`Cube's' Cogs Stuck In Its Pure Visuals". San Francisco Chronicle.
  15. ↑ Emmer, Michele; Manaresi, Mirella (2003). Mathematics, Art, Technology, and Cinema. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. pp. 172–180. ISBN 3-540-00601-X.
  16. ↑ "Cube (1998)". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango. Retrieved 20 November 2016.
  17. ↑ "Cube Reviews". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 20 November 2016.
  18. ↑ Fitch, Alex (4 May 2010). "Cube". Electric Sheep Magazine.
  19. ↑ Newman, Kim. "Cube". Empire Online.
  20. ↑ Axmaker, Sean (13 November 1998). "Cube". Nitrate Online.
  21. ↑ Bloody Disgusting Staff (22 October 2004). "Cube". Bloody Disgusting.
  22. ↑ Schager, Nick (12 April 2003). "Cube". Slant Magazine. Retrieved 23 May 2014.
  23. ↑ "Cube 2: Hypercube". The New York Times.
  24. ↑ "Cube Zero". The New York Times.
  25. ↑ Kit, Borys (2015-04-30). "Lionsgate to Remake Cult Sci-Fi Hit 'Cube'". The Hollywood Reporter.
  26. ↑ Lesnick, Silas (2015-04-30). "Lionsgate Plans Cube Remake, Cubed". Comingsoon.net.
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