Cube (1997 film)
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 | This article possibly contains original research. (August 2008) |
| 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 First Independent Films |
Release date | 9 September 1997 (Canada) |
Running time | 90 minutes |
| Country |  Canada |
| Languages | English, French |
| Budget | CAD 365,000 |
Cube is a 1997 Canadian psychological thriller/horror/science fiction 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 cult status. This was also the last film to be released in Canada by Cineplex Odeon Films before they changed their name to Odeon Films.
Much of the film's appeal lies in its surreal, Kafkaesque settings–no extensive attempt is made to explain what the cube in which the characters are confined is, why it is created, or how the "inmates" were selected. Although the world "outside" is referred to, it is presented in an extremely abstract fashion–either a dark void or a bright white light.
Plot summary
 | This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. (August 2008) |
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, one at the center of each wall, including the ceiling and floor. After recovering from his confusion, he opens two of the doors and looks into them to find rooms that differ to the one he is in only by color. He then opens and goes through a third door. He looks around and then takes a step, but is suddenly cut into large cubes. He falls apart and the rack of crosshatched wires which diced him moves into view. It folds up and retracts.
Later, in another room, several people find each other: Quentin, Worth, Holloway, Rennes, and Leaven. None of them know where they are, how they got there, or why they are there. Quentin, however, knows that there are traps, as he had looked into a room and nearly got his head cut off. The five decide to stay together and look for the way out. Rennes takes the lead. He exemplifies how to test for traps by tossing a boot into the rooms while holding onto the laces, to trigger potential traps, figuring that the trapped room contain motion detectors. Holloway speculates on several possibilities, being aliens or the government. Rennes remarks that staying still will not solve anything, and says that they should move in a straight line until they get to the end. The others agree, and they begin moving through the rooms.
While moving, they discover a series of numbers the hatchways between each of the rooms. At one point, Rennes throws the boot in and doesn't find anything, but detects that the room has dry air, and deduces that it most likely employs an electrochemical sensor, which detects hydrogen sulphide emitted from the skin. Quentin realizes that Rennes is an escape artist who has escaped more than seven major prisons. Soon after, Rennes jumps into a room tested with a boot, and is sprayed in the face with acid. The others pull him back, but he dies as the acid corrodes his face and the inside of his head. The group decides that the room must have contained an electrochemical sensor which Rennes missed, and realize that they must find a better way of testing the rooms.
Quentin asks everyone about their occupations. He says he is a police officer, Holloway says she is a doctor, and Worth says he works "in an office building, doing office building stuff." Leaven claims simply to "hang out" with her friends. Quentin believes that nothing is a coincidence, that each of them has a purpose in the cube. After Holloway talks about her rings and broaches, Quentin asks why Leaven has her glasses, while Holloway has had her jewellery taken away. Leaven reveals herself to excel at mathematics, and after looking at the numbers on a crawlspace, theorizes that when one of those numbers is prime, the room is booby-trapped.
Leaven's purpose becomes attempting to "crack the Cube's code", and they progress through the cubes. When they find themselves in a room with trapped rooms all around and below, Quentin checks the door in the ceiling, through which falls a seventh person: Kazan. He appears to be mentally handicapped. At least two of the others see him as a burden, but Holloway decides to bring him along.
The group starts speculating about their surroundings, which causes a conflict between Quentin and Holloway. Quentin dismisses Holloway's ideas as conspiracy theories, and Holloway thinks that Quentin is naive. Soon after this, Quentin enters a room without prime numbers and narrowly avoids death from a trap consisting of rotating razor wires. Leaven's theory that non-prime-numbered rooms are safe is shown to be incorrect. Quentin begins suspecting that Worth is a spy, and is increasingly irritated by Kazan's mental state. The group rests, while Leaven attempts to decipher the numbers.
After some time, Quentin tricks Worth into revealing that he is one of the architects who designed the enormous cube-shaped shell which contains the cube-shaped rooms. When asked about who contracted him to do the job, he states that he doesn't know. Although the others begin to distrust Worth (Quentin going as far as beating him) , he is able to give them information about the dimensions of the outer cube: it is 434 feet (26 rooms) on each side, totaling 17,576 rooms. Leaven then intuits that the numbers between the rooms could be encoded cartesian coordinates representing the position of rooms within the Cube. The group begins moving towards the nearest edge. As for the traps, they begin to "boot" the rooms again.
The group is forced to pass through a room containing a sound-activated trap. Quentin argues to leave Kazan behind, but Holloway overrules him. Everyone makes it through, but when it is Quentin's turn, Kazan calls out, and nearly causes his death. Quentin, furious, nearly beats him, and when Holloway stops him, he turns on her and they argue heatedly, ending when Quentin slaps her. Despite the growing tensions, they continue.
The group finally reaches one of the side "edges" of the Cube, but discovers that there is a gap between the door and the outer shell. They fashion a rope from their clothes, and Holloway volunteers to swing out on the rope to investigate. As she is suspended outside the room, the Cube shakes and Holloway nearly falls. Quentin catches her, but then lets her fall to her death. He tells the others that she slipped, but they are dubious.
The group then decides to try to reach the "bottom" edge of the Cube, but agree that they need to rest before setting out for it. As they sleep, Quentin carries Leaven into another room. He tries to convince Leaven to abandon the others, and makes a sexual advances at her and becomes abusive when it is obvious that she dislikes him. Worth and Kazan awaken and save Leaven. Quentin becomes paranoid, and says that he did not trust Holloway, to which the rest of the group guesses that he let her die. Enraged, Quentin beats and then throws Worth through a door in the floor. Worth laughs hysterically at what he sees in that room: Rennes's corpse. They think that they have been going in circles, but then Worth notices that the "acid room" which killed Rennes is no longer adjacent to that room. He and Leaven realize that the rooms must be moving. Leaven also realizes that rooms which have traps are marked with numbers which are not simply prime numbers, as she had previously thought, but the larger set of prime powers. The prisoners then face the task of performing prime factorizations of three three-digit numbers for every room they enter. Fortunately, Kazan is at this point is revealed to be an autistic savant with the capacity to perform these factorizations quickly and easily. He utters the number of distinct prime factors each number has, as the room numbers are read to him.
They make their way towards the exit safely with Kazan's help. Worth devises a plan to incapacitate Quentin, who has gone completely mad. Worth fights Quentin into a room below them and they leave him to die. They proceed and reach the bridge cube. When they open its door, bright light pours into the room. Worth announces that he will not go, as there is nothing for him in the world outside. As he and Leaven share a moment, Quentin appears having somehow managed to catch up with the trio, and kills Leaven by stabbing her with a door handle he somehow broke off a door. He stabs Worth as well, and grabs Kazan, who is climbing out. Worth grabs Quentin's leg with the last of his strength, and Quentin is crushed in the crawlspace between the cubes when the cubes realign. Having saved Kazan, Worth lies down next to Leaven and dies.
In the final shot, Kazan is seen walking slowly into a bright light.
Power struggles and character development
The director and writers state (in the DVD Commentary) that each character in the film was designed to play through a certain arc of character development. This is presented through the plot twists, changes in party leader, and who the audience hopes will escape.
Quentin
Quentin is the character who thrusts himself into the position of leader and appears to be the main character when the group first assembles. He claims to be a cop and is strong and level headed. He takes on most of the dangerous tasks and claims to look for "practical solutions". However, it is soon revealed (mainly through Quentin's confrontation with Worth in the Red Room) that he is violent, cruel–especially to Worth–and slightly unhinged, with a possible "thing for young girls". As the film progresses, he tries to take control of Leaven for her mathematical abilities, and becomes a villain. He is responsible for disrupting the group, and is himself literally torn apart at the end.
Holloway
Dr Helen Holloway is the elder woman of the group and a free clinic doctor. She is shown at the start to be bitter, paranoid, and melodramatic. She spouts conspiracy theories and believes that the U.S Government is responsible for the Cube. She becomes more human, however, and tends to Quentin's wounds. She looks after Kazan with patience and gentleness. She shows that she can be calm when necessary, when she explains to Quentin why they need Worth. She attempts to connect with Worth before Quentin kills her. In the film, she changes from being the most unstable member of the group to being the calm opposition to Quentin. She is presumably killed when Quentin tries to pull her back into the cube, but lets go of her intentionally and she plummets into the darkness.
Leaven
Joan Leaven begins the film as a damsel in distress. Rather than exploring her surroundings, she screams for help until she attracts Quentin, Holloway and Worth. She is the only member of the group to have personal belongings (her glasses). She is modest in claiming she's nothing special, because she has expert mathematical skills (especially on little sleep) for her level of education which aid the group. She prompts Worth to keep going, and is invaluable to the group for much of the film. She is killed by Quentin while trying to escape the cube.
Worth
David Worth's transformation begins with him lying on the ground, looking injured and grim. He maintains a doomed outlook throughout the first part of the film, and mocks Quentin's attempts at escape. He is asked why he even follows the others, when he claims to have no reason to live. He does not contribute much to the group, but sometimes leads Kazan and "boots" rooms (throwing boots into them to test for traps). When the group reaches the Red Room, Quentin confronts Worth. It becomes known that Worth worked on the design of the outer shell or cube. He claims not to know about the purpose, construction, or traps of the rooms, but knows that people were being put in for a few months. Quentin reacts in anger to Worth's story, and Worth gives a long, lucid speech about the futility of leadership: "The cube's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan. Can you grasp that, Holloway? Big Brother is not watching you." Quentin says that Worth's function in the group is "The Poison", another obstacle for them to overcome, with no function but the cause of conflict. However, Worth later becomes the replacement hero. He continues to fight Quentin, and eventually tries to disable him. He is beaten by Quentin but luckily avoids being killed by traps in the rooms that Quentin throws him into. He rescues Kazan and Leaven at different points in the film. At the end, he decides that he has nothing to live for and chooses to die by the exit. When Leaven asks him what is out there, he answers: "Boundless human stupidity". He is then stabbed in the stomach by Quentin, but manages to both kill Quentin and aid in Kazan's escape. He then crawls over to Leaven's corpse and passes away.
Rennes
Rennes, also known as "The Wren", first appears to the group as the most knowledgeable of their surroundings, and the reluctant leader. He is an escape artist who "flew the coop" from seven major prisons, and comes up with the method of using boots to test for traps, and sucking on a button to keep their saliva flowing. He has a facial tic or spasm, but seems physically fit for an older man. He detects a trap that the boot does not, and uses it to urge the others to "concentrate on what's in front of you". Despite his calm skillfulness and experience, he is killed by a trap. He changes from a specialist and central character to an early victim.
Kazan
Kazan is introduced as the autistic man who seems only to be dead weight. He is immediately distrusted by Quentin, who believes that he may have been put into the Cube to slow them down or put them at greater risk. Only later does his usefulness to the others become clear, when they discover his ability to rapidly and accurately perform the prime number calculations necessary for the group to move through the Cube quickly and safely. In the end, he is the only prisoner who makes it out of the Cube alive.
There is speculation that Kazan and Eric Wynn (from Cube Zero) are the same person. Eric was lobotomized at the end of the film and put back into the Cube behaving and speaking in the same way as Kazan. Eric was a child prodigy, able to recognize and solve patterns with ease; at one point, he tells the others to read the codes at the doors to him so he can tell them the correct route, like how Kazan helps his group. The director's commentary for Cube Zero states: "Maybe this is Kazan or how Kazan came to be, making this much more of a prequel than a sequel."
Alderson
Alderson appears at the opening of the film (and on the DVD packaging) but does not meet the others. He is killed within minutes, but is first made to appear to be a main character. The fact that the actor who played him was fitted with a headpiece to look as if he has a shaven head, and that the group lacks a moral or spiritual authority, have led to the notion that Alderson was a Buddhist or Catholic monk.[citation needed] Due to his lack of contact with the other characters, Alderson might have been part of another group placed in the cube earlier, as Worth mentioned that he knew people were being put in the cube for a few months. (This theory does not fit with Cube Zero, in which it is revealed that the cube is "swept" periodically. However, the two films were written by different people, and the sweep might not apply to Cube.) It is also possible that he was put in at the same time as the rest of the group, but due to his early death never meet up with them. This is in keeping with both Cube and Cube Zero
Character Names
All the characters are named after prisons. Quentin is named after San Quentin State Prison in California, Holloway after the Holloway Prison in London, Kazan after the prison in Kazan, Tatarstan, Russia. Rennes is named after a prison in Rennes, Britanny, France, Alderson after the prison in Alderson, West Virginia, and Leaven and Worth after the prison in Leavenworth, Kansas.
The characters themselves reflect the prisons in their traits.[1] Kazan (the autistic man) is a disorganized prison. Rennes (the "mentor") pioneered many of today's prison policies. Quentin (the policeman) is known for brutality. Holloway is a women's prison. Alderson is a prison where isolation is a common punishment. Leavenworth runs on a rigid set of rules (Leaven's mathematics), and the new prison is corporately owned and built (Worth, hired as an architect).
Most character's first names are either not given or not revealed until later in the film.
Traps
The various traps in the Cube:
- The mesh trap–A hallmark trap of the Cube series as the first to be shown in the first movie, with a brief appearance in Cube Zero prequel. It is a rack of razor-sharp wire which unfurls and falls from the ceiling onto the victim who walks into the room. It slices the victim's body into cube-shaped chunks, which then fall apart. The wire rack then folds up, and returns to its original position. Alderson is killed at the beginning of the film by this trap.
- Flamethrower–A simple trap, this is simply a flame thrower that comes out of the walls and shoots fire when a victim is detected in the room. This trap can be detected by throwing a boot into the room to set off the motion sensors.
- Acid sprayer–A small hole in the wall opens to spray a strong acid into a victim's face, quickly dissolving it and killing the person. Unlike the flamethrower, this trap is not detectable by boot and appears to be activated by the chemical detector. Rennes is killed by this trap.
- Spear trap–This trap is sound activated (though built to ignore the noisy opening of cube doors). Metal spears extend out of the walls and across the room to skewer those within. The characters are still able to pass through a room with this trap by being silent and careful. Production designs in the DVD special features show that the spikes are constructed so that they retract into a coil, thus explaining how such long spikes can fit in the walls.
- The wire twist trap–Lines of razor wire extend from ceiling to floor, to form a round cage around a target. They twist inwards like a spiral to cut the victim into pieces, much like the swinging dicer trap. Quentin gets caught in this trap but rolls away before it closes completely. It is dubbed the "Sushi Trap" or "Sushi Machine" by Quentin.
- Unknown trap–Little is known about this trap. Rennes discovers it before entering, due to the dryness of the air in the room. It reacts to the hydrogen sulfide gas emitted by the occupant. This trap shows that there are several types of sensors used throughout the cube that are immune to the boot test.
- Cube transitions–The movement of the cubes themselves could also be considered a trap. Anyone who is in the crawlspace between the cubes during the shuffle is torn in half as the rooms move apart. Quentin is killed by this "trap".
Mathematics in Cube
Natali states in the Cube commentary that a professor was hired to do the math for Cube, and that it makes enough sense to the point where one could actually build the structure as it is described in the film. This system is discovered bit by bit by the characters who learn to use it to navigate. Leavin plays the greatest role in its induction, and Quentin shows the least understanding of her math, whereas Worth—having helped with the Cube's construction—communicates with her more, and Kazaan eventually provides crucial calculations that aid her navigation.
The following "clues" are gradually revealed as the film progresses. The characters realize quickly that the Cube maze consists of interlocking cubical rooms, each with six doors leading to another cubical room, with a narrow passageway connecting the two. Each door is opened manually from inside the room, with no visible mechanism on the other side of the door which we are shown briefly as Holloway first enters the scene. Its noted there are two labels in any given passageway, marking each room with a unique nine digit number. Leavin realizes the "decoded" Cartesian coordinates for the positions of the rooms are obtained by adding together the digits of each three digit number, so that a number "582 434 865" would become "5+8+2 4+3+4 8+6+5" or an x,y,z coordinate of (15,11,19). Worth reveals that the dimensions of the outer shell are "434 feet squared," and Leavin measures the inside length of one of the rooms by walking and calculates the Cube must consist of 26x26x26 rooms, or 17,576 rooms.
Leavin then theorizes that the trapped rooms factor into the math. She notes that the labels of three of the known trapped rooms contained a prime number, and theorizes that any room containing a prime number is trapped, which holds true for awhile. But later, a trapped room is found that did not contain a prime number, and she states that the numbers must be more complex than she thought. Eventually when the group lands back in a room already visited, Worth theorizes that the rooms are actually shifting positions. Leavin expands on her theory into a more complex one and reveals the following inductions to the group:
- That the rooms cycle around before returning to their starting positions.
- That there is a "bridge", a single room which sometimes connects the maze to the outer shell and provides the only known means of escape.
- That the number of each room reveals "where the room is, how many times it moves, and where it moves to."
- That the traps are "identified by numbers that are the power of a prime."
- That the permutations by which the rooms move around are calculated by "subtracting the digits."
- And, that to figure out which rooms are trapped, she must "calculate the factors in each set."
She concludes she cannot navigate because the math is too involved to do mentally in time. Then Kazaan starts giving her the prime factors of the three digit numbers, which she uses in combination with her system to navigate their way to the bridge, which leads outside the Cube. The full complexities of her system are never fully revealed and it is left to the audience to come to their own conclusions about its workings and validity.
Production details
The movie was shot on a Toronto soundstage. Only one "cube", measuring 14 by 14 by 14 feet, was built. The color 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. After the wrap party, a number of crew members were moved into the cube after passing out. Their reactions can be scene in a DVD extras easter egg.
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 would be six different colors 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 colors of room in the movie.
Sequels
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.
See also
- The Cube, a 1969 television film by Jim Henson
References
External links
