Cube (1997 film)

For the 1969 film by Jim Henson, see The Cube.

Cube
DVD Cover
Directed by	Vincenzo Natali
Written by	André Bijelic, Graeme Manson, Vincenzo Natali
Produced by	Mehra Meh
Starring	Nicole de Boer, Nicky Guadagni, David Hewlett, Andrew Miller
Cinematography	Derek Rogers
Edited by	John Sanders
Music by	Mark Korven
Distributed by	Cineplex-Odeon Films
Release date	9 September 1997 (Canada)
Running time	90 minutes
Languages	English, french
Budget	CAD 365,000

Cube is a 1997 Canadian sci-fi/horror movie directed by Vincenzo Natali.

The film was a very successful product of the Canadian Film Centre's First Feature Project. Despite its low budget, the film achieved moderate commercial success and has acquired something of a cult status as a niche science-fiction title.

Plot summary

Much of the film's appeal lies in its surreal, almost Kafkaesque setting — no extensive attempt is made to explain what the cube in which the characters are confined is, or why it is created, or why the "inmates" were specifically selected to be imprisoned inside. Although the world "outside" is referred to, it is presented in an extremely abstract fashion as either a dark void or a bright white light.

The film opens with a man named Alderson waking up in a strange, cube-shaped room with glowing, computer-circuit like walls and six doors, each one in the center of the four walls, the ceiling and the floor. After recovering from shock and confusion, he opens two of the doors and looks into the rooms beyond, only to find them identical to the one he is in except in color. He then opens a third door, and enters the room beyond. He looks around, and the room appears safe, but then he steps forward, and suddenly, something slices his body into chunks, sushi style, and he falls apart, dead. Then a rack of razor-sharp wire moves into view, which apparently had diced Alderson. It folds itself up and resets itself.

Later, in another room, several other people start finding each other. Quentin, a cop, Worth a businessman, Holloway a doctor, Rennes, an escape-artist, and Leaven a college student. None of the people know how they got there, anything about the prison they are in, or why they are there at all. Quentin, however, knows that there are traps, as he earlier looked into a room and nearly got his head cut off. Reasoning that there must be a way out of the prison if they are in, they decide to join together and see if they can find the way out. Rennes, having escaped from no fewer than seven prisons, takes the lead and shows how to test for traps by tossing a boot into a room first, in hopes that it will trigger a trap.

However, after giving a speech on keeping things simple, and "only [looking] at what's in front of you", Rennes jumps into a room that he believes is safe, only to have his face sprayed with acid and dying horribly. The group extrapolates that the floor may have been pressure sensitive, or the trap thermally activated. They reason they must find a more accurate way to test for traps.

Quentin takes charge and asks everyone what their occupation was before they were put into the cube. Holloway was a free clinic doctor, and Quentin was a cop. Worth worked "in an office building, doing office building stuff", and Leaven "hangs out with her friends". Quentin postulates that nothing is left to chance, that each of them and anything they have has a purpose, and questions the reason why Leaven still has her glasses while Holloway had her jewelery taken. Leaven, who is a math expert, remembers that each room had a set of numbers associated with them (engraved in the crawlspaces between the rooms), and when one of those numbers was prime, a trap was always in that room.

Leaven's purpose becomes "cracking the cube's code", and they make good progress through the cube. When they end up in a room with trapped rooms all around and below, Quentin proceeds to check the door in the ceiling, through which falls down a seventh person: Kazan. He appears to be mentally handicapped, and hence annoying and endangering the group.

The group starts speculating about the origins of the cube which initiates a conflict between Quentin and Holloway: While Quentin dismisses Holloway's ideas as conspiracy theories, Holloway thinks Quentin is naïve. They also fight due to Holloway being caring and sympathetic for the autistic Kazan, while Quentin is angered by him and wants to leave him.

Quentin enters one of the cubes assumed safe and narrowly avoids death. Leaven's conjecture that non-prime-numbered rooms are safe turns out to be incorrect, and the group rests for a while. Worth and Quentin get into a fight, and through it is revealed that Worth was nothing more or less than an architect who designed a massive outer shell which houses the cube that the rooms make up. In other words, a designer of the Cube. Though this sparks enormous distrust of Worth, it also provides salvation; Worth can provide information about the dimensions of the outer shell (it is 434 feet on a side). Leaven then realizes that the numbers in the crawlspaces between the cubes represent encoded Cartesian coordinates, showing where each room is in the cube. With Worth's information, she can now guess at the size of the maze. She paces off 14 feet, and deduces that the maze could be at most, 26 cubes by 26 cubes by 26 cubes, or 17576 rooms. (Although not stated in the film, her calculation appears to assume, apparently correctly, that the outer dimensions of the rooms are about one and a half feet longer than their inner dimensions, so each room measures about 16.69 feet on an external side. Note that one could find external dimensions extrapolating from the length of crawlways between rooms.) Using the encoded coordinates, she is also able to determine they are just seven rooms from one face of the cube. (It is not made clear how she knows which direction to travel to get there, since the rooms apparently contain no information about their orientation with respect to the axis of the coordinate system.)

As they make their way to the face, Quentin, sparked on and gradually being driven mad by his conflicts with Worth and Holloway and immensely annoyed by Kazan, starts to become cold, unfeeling and evil. The group comes to a room, very near to the face of the cube, but it is trapped with spears that come out of the walls, and is sound-activated. Quentin refuses to backtrack, insisting that they make their way through this trapped room because with it being sound-activated, they can do so if they are very quiet. Nearly all of them get through, but at the last second, Kazan, unable to understand what is happening, makes a noise, and Quentin once again narrowly escapes death. He gets extremely angry with Kazan, and everyone starts bickering. Quentin's descent into madness and evil is imminent.

The group then finally reaches the face of the cube, only to discover there is a gap between the last cube's outer door and the outer shell. Fashioning a rope made from their clothes, Holloway volunteers to go outside on the rope and try to see anything. When she is suspended from the makeshift rope, the cube shakes and Holloway nearly falls. Quentin catches her, but then lets her fall to her death, pretending to the others it was an accident.

After some rest, Leaven is awakened to find Quentin's hand on her mouth, and told they will "be going to the bottom. It will be quiet there". Attempting to convince Leaven that they do not need the others, Quentin makes a sexual advance, and Worth and Kazan wake up to save Leaven from Quentin. Quentin says he did not trust Holloway, so now the group also guesses Holloway's death was not an accident.

Quentin tosses Worth down through a floor door in a fit of rage, only for Worth to start laughing hysterically at what he has found in the room below: Rennes's corpse. At first they think they have been going in circles but Worth quickly notices that the acid room that killed Rennes is no longer adjacent to the room they occupy. He and Leaven realize that the rooms change their locations by moving about vacant spaces in the cube over time.

Leaven soon discerns that the sets of numbers on a room encode something else besides its traps and current location; the numbers can undergo permutations, and the permutations show how a room progresses through the cube. After minutes of calculation, Leaven discovers that a room they had been in much earlier at one point would be outside the cube, in other words, between the outer-shell and the cube, and hence, a bridge to the outside world. She realizes that if they had just stayed in the room they had started in they would have eventually been linked to the this bridge cube and thus the exit (although this means that they would never have found Kazan).

Leaven also works out that the deadly cubes are those whose numbers include a power of a prime (including, of course, the first power). Upon this discovery, the prisoners are faced with the task of performing prime factorizations of three-digit numbers – a difficult task in some cases (though not quite as difficult as Leaven presents it to be). Fortunately they discover that Kazan, the formerly useless autistic savant, can perform such factorizations with ease; he announces the number of distinct prime factors each number has almost as quickly as Leaven can read it to him.

Using Kazan, now the most valuable person in the group, they make their way safely towards where they estimate the exit to the cube is. Worth conspires to incapacitate Quentin, who has now gone completely mad. Leaven, Worth, and Kazan fight Quentin into a room below them and leave him to die. They navigate the maze a little further and finally find the bridge cube. They open the door and bright light pours into the room; the exit is before them. They are about to leave when Worth announces that he won't go, there is nothing for him outside the cube. At this point, Quentin catches up to them, half-dead. With a spike he stole from the door of one of the rooms he kills Leaven, stabs Worth, and is about to kill Kazan (who is just leaving) when Worth uses the last of his strength to hang on to Quentin's leg. Quentin is caught between the exit and the cube, which starts to move. He is severed in half as the bridge cube moves fully away, shifting to its starting position, not to align itself with the exit again for days. Worth lies down next to Leaven, and dies.

Only Kazan makes it out alive. The outside world is not shown, but Kazan is seen slowly walking alone into bright light, possibly a reference to "the light" which describes a passage into the afterlife. A possible purpose of what is beyond ends up being revealed in Cube Zero, though that movie was not written by Natali and is not part of his concept.

Power struggles and character development

The director and writers have stated (on the DVD Commentary) that each of the characters in the film was designed to play through a certain arc of character development. This is presented through many twists in the story and changes in who leads the party of six and who the audience really wants to escape.

Quentin

Quentin is the character who thrusts himself forward as the lead and who appears to be the main character as the group assembles. He claims to be a cop and is both strong and level headed, putting himself forward for most of the dangerous tasks and claiming he is looking for "practical solutions". However, the film soon reveals (mainly through Quentin's confrontation with Worth in the Red Room) that he is not all he appears. He shows himself to be both violent, cruel, especially to Worth, and slightly unhinged with a "thing for young girls" as Holloway puts it. As the film transpires and he tries to take control of Leaven (who is generally seen as the most capable of the group) the character becomes more of a villain and is responsible for tearing the group apart.

Holloway

Dr Helen Holloway is the eldest woman of the group and is a free clinic doctor. Her demeanour shows her at the start to be bitter, paranoid and melodramatic. She is the main source of the conspiracy theories and often states that she thinks the U.S Government is responsible for the Cube. As the film progresses she becomes more human, tending to Quentin's wounds after the "Sushi Machine Encounter" and being responsible for looking after Kazan when they find him. She also shows herself to be calm when needed and explains to Quentin in the Red Room why they need Worth. She attempts to make a connection with Worth shortly before she tries to reach the outer wall when they are at the edge and is finally killed by Quentin there (realizing his change from hero to villain), having changed from the most unstable of the group to a pivotal element of calm that opposes Quentin.

Leaven

Joan Leaven begins the film as a screaming and helpless damsel in distress. Rather than explore her surroundings she begins to scream for help until she attracts Quentin, Holloway and Worth. She is the only member of the group to have any belongings (her glasses) and transforms to a capable means of escape and the only one who forces Worth to carry on. Her skills as a mathematician become invaluable to the group for most of the film, yet Quentin keeps her around for other reasons. She is eventually killed by him while trying to escape the cube.

Worth

David Worth's transformation begins with him lying placidly on the ground, injured and grim-looking. He maintains his grim outlook throughout the first part of the film, pausing only to mock Quentin's attempts to leave. He is frequently asked why he even bothers to follow the others and appears to have no reason to live; "I'm just a guy. I work in an office building doing office building things, okay?" He functions as nothing but dead weight to the group, capable of doing nothing other than lead Kazan and "booting" rooms (throwing boots into them to test for motion-sensitive traps). However, when they reach the Red Room (shortly after the "Sushi Machine Trap"), Quentin confronts Worth and challenges him. At this point it becomes apparent that Worth worked on designing the outer shell of the cube. He claims to know little about the purpose or construction of the room or about the traps, but did know that people were being put inside for a few months. In the Red Room, Worth reacts to Quentin and explodes in anger as he tells his story. He gives a long, lucid and notable speech about the futility of leadership citing that "It (the world) is all a headless blunder functioning under the illusion of a master plan. Can you grasp that, Holloway? Big Brother is not watching you." He then says his function in the group is "The Poison," meaning he sees himself as another obstacle for them to overcome, having no function other than to promote conflict. However, as the film moves on he becomes the replacement hero. He regularly confronts and fights Quentin, engineering plans to disable him. He receives severe beatings and abuse from Quentin and is extremely lucky in avoiding trapped rooms that Quentin throws him into; he rescues Kazan when he is separated from himself and Leaven, and rescues Leaven from Quentin before leading them to the edge. At the end, however, he decides he has nothing to live for and elects to die in the cube when he reaches the exit. "What is out there?" Leaven asks him. "Boundless human stupidity," he replies before Leaven is stabbed through the stomach by Quentin. Quentin then stabs Worth in the stomach, but as Quentin is about to make his escape through the door Worth grabs Quentin's legs and prevents him from escaping (and ultimately causes Quentin's death as the cube shifts, squashing Quentin and allowing Kazan to escape). His role in preventing Quentin from escaping represents his completing the move from "Poison" to the role of group hero and leader.

Rennes

Rennes, also known as "The Wren", begins the film by appearing to be the natural reluctant leader and the most knowledgeable. He is a self-described escape artist who "flew the coop" on seven major prisons and who develops the method of using a boot to detect traps. He has good senses and is athletic for an older man, despite a facial tic or spasm that is never explained. He detects one trap that the boot does not and establishes the philosophy of "concentrating on what's in front of you" that the group later has to apply. However, despite his apparent knowledge and calm, it is while becoming involved in a petty argument after just saying this that he dies (having broken his own rule to become involved in the petty squabbles of the group). Rennes is killed when acid is sprayed in his face and shows his change from a specialist character and the group's only hope to simply a victim with little use at all.

Kazan

Main articles: Kazan (Cube Character) and Kazan

)

Kazan shows his change most simply as being the autistic man who seems only to slow them down. Immediately distrusted by Quentin and almost discarded by Leaven before the "silence trap," it is presumed he exists either to cripple their speed or to kill them off. However, it transpires that he is a pivotal part of their escape as he is the only one who can complete the calculations needed to reach safety. Over time he changes from a means of slowing them to their embodied ability to move safely.

Some speculation came about that Kazan and Eric Wynn (from Cube Zero) were the same person. Theories to support this claim are that Eric was lobotomized at the end of the film and put back into the Cube, behaving and speaking in a fashion similar to Kazan. Eric was also a child prodigy, able to look at and deduce patterns with ease (at one point he tells the others to read the codes off the exits to him so he can tell them which is the correct route, akin to how Kazan helps the group). The director's commentary for Cube Zero also states "Maybe this is Kazan or how Kazan came to be, making this much more of a prequel than a sequel."

Alderson

Alderson, a character who appears at the opening of the film (and on the DVD packaging) does not meet up with the rest of the group and is killed in the opening seconds of the movie. However, it is set so that he appears to be a main character at the start before dying and being revealed as nothing other than a taste of the carnage to come. There is some speculation as to what "purpose" Alderson was meant to serve should he have survived long enough to meet the group. The fact that the actor who played him was fitted with a headpiece to make the Alderson character shaven-headed and that the group lacks any moral or spiritual authority has led to the notion that Alderson may have been a Buddhist or Catholic monk. Due to his complete lack of contact with the other characters Alderson might have been part of an earlier group placed in the cube, as Worth mentioned that he knew people were being put in the cube for a few months.

About the characters' names

All the characters are named after prisons: Quentin after San Quentin State Prison in California; Holloway after the Holloway Prison in England; Kazan after the prison in Kazan, Russia; Rennes after a prison in Rennes, France; Alderson after the prison in Alderson, West Virginia; Leaven and Worth after the prison in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Not only are the characters named after prisons but they reflect the prisons themselves [1] Example: Kazan (the autistic man) is a disorganized prison. Rennes (the "mentor") was a jail that pioneered many of today's prison policies. Quentin (the policeman) is known for its brutality. Holloway is a women's prison, and Alderson is a prison where isolation is a common punishment. Leavenworth runs to a rigid set of rules (Leaven's mathematics), and the new prison is corporately owned and built (Worth, hired as an architect).

The Traps

The various lethal traps encountered in the Cube in the movie.

The Mesh Trap (a.k.a. The Swinging Dicer)

A hallmark trap of the Cube series, due to being the first one seen, having a brief appearance in the Cube Zero prequel, and being the most famous trap of the movies. It is a rack of razor-sharp wire which unfurls and descends from the ceiling onto the victim who walks into the room and triggers it. It slices the victim's body into numerous cube-shaped chunks, which stay intact in the shape of the body at first, but then quickly fall apart into pieces. The razorwire rack then moves into view, folds itself up, and then ascends and resets itself. Alderson is killed early on in the film via this trap.

The movie Resident Evil is known to pay homage to this particular trap, but done using a wire frame made from lasers instead.

Flamethrower

A fairly simple trap, this is simply a flame thrower that comes out of the walls when a victim is detected in the room and shoots fire at them. This trap is detectable by throwing a boot into the room which sets off the motion sensors.

Acid Sprayer

Nozzles come out of the wall which spray a fast-acting acid into the face of a victim, quickly dissolving it into a bloody mess and killing them quickly. Unlike the flamethrower, this trap is not detectable via a boot and appears to be activated by the weight of the person when they enter the room. Rennes is killed in this trap.

Spear Trap

This trap is sound activated (though it is built to ignore the noisy opening of a door in the cube); metal spears rapidly come out of the walls and floor of the cube and extend across the room, presumably skewering anybody within it. The characters are able to get through the room with this trap safely, however, by being very silent and careful. A goof of the movie is that although the spears extend across the entire length of the room, judging from length of the crawlspaces between the rooms, there does not appear to be enough room in the walls to house spears this long. However, it is possible the spears fold or bend within or outside the shell of the cube they are built into--production designs in the DVD special features show that the spikes are supposedly constructed in such a way that they retract into a coil.

The Wire Twist Trap (a.k.a. The Sushi Trap)

This trap consists of lines of razorwire extending from the ceiling to the floor which form a round cage around a detected target and then move in a circle and close in on the victim and presumably slice them into large chunks much like the swinging dicer trap. Quentin nearly gets caught in this trap but rolls out of it just before it closes in completely. It is dubbed the "Sushi Trap" or "Sushi Machine" by Quentin.

Unknown Trap

Little is known about this trap although Rennes discovers it before entering due to the unusual smell in the room. It reacts to the hydrogen sulfide gas being emitted by the occupant. This trap is important because it shows that there are multiple types of sensors being used throughout the cube that are immune to the boot test.

Cube Transitions

The cubes moving could also be considered a trap. Anyone who is in the crawlspace between the cubes when they move is crushed as they move apart. Quentin succumbs to this fate.

Mathematics in Cube

By the nature of the premise, mathematics feature crucially in the film, as the only medium by which the characters can understand their situation. The first clue that math, or more accurately numbers, played a part in the world of the Cube came when it was noted by the characters that each cubic room had at its entrance a numerical marking consisting of three sets of three digits. The key discovery of the mathematical workings of the Cube is made by Leaven when she deduces that all rooms marked at their entrance with at least one prime number are trapped. The second discovery Leaven makes is that a trapped room can also be marked by a number which is 'a power of a prime'. The second mathematical purpose of these numerical markings are as a way of mapping out where in the structure one specific room is. Leaven tells that the cube is 26 rooms across, and the number of a given room's starting spot is the sum of the three-digit numbers. For example, a room marked '456 126 691' is located at 4+5+6=15, 1+2+6=9, 6+9+1=16, or the coordinate point (15, 9, 16). Later in the movie it is discovered by Leaven that these numbers are somehow related to Cartesian coordinates and that they keep track of the positions the rooms assume as the cube shifts.

Production details

The movie was shot on a Toronto soundstage. Only one "cube", measuring 14 by 14 by 14 feet, was built. The colour of the room was changed by sliding panels. Since this task 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.

Another partial "cube" was made for shots from a different room.

There was only one working door which could support the weight of the actors.

It was intended that there be six different colours of room, 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 fifth gel panel and so there are only five different colours of room in the movie.

Sequels

Main article: Cube film series

Cube is followed by the sequel Cube 2: Hypercube (2002) and the prequel Cube Zero (2004).

Cast

• Nicole de Boer as Joan Leaven, a college mathematics student.
• Nicky Guadagni as Dr. Helen Holloway, a free clinic doctor.
• David Hewlett as David Worth, an architect of the outer shell.
• Andrew Miller as Kazan, the autistic savant.
• Julian Richings as Alderson, the first victim.
• Wayne Robson as 'The Wren' Rennes, the fugitive.
• Maurice Dean Wint as Quentin, the corrupted cop.

Similiar works

• Lord of the Flies, a novel by William Golding.
• The Probe (episode), the Outer Limits episode that inspired this movie.
• The Cube
• House of 9
• Haze
• "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", a short story by Harlan Ellison
• Diamond Dogs, a novella by Alastair Reynolds
• Lost
• Five Characters In Search Of An Exit
• Huis Clos, by Jean-Paul Sartre
• And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie
• House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
• Allegiance: Episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation
• Battle Royale
• Rogue Moon, a novel by Algis Budrys
• House of Stairs, a novel by William Sleator
• Saw (film series)

External links

• Cube at IMDb