How I made it 27 years without seeing this movie, is a mystery to me. Cube, a 1997 Canadian Sci-fi, Indie, cerebral, pseudo-horror flick by director Vincenzo Natali, is all that I could ever ask for in a film.
Six strangers wake up to find themselves dressed in prison garb and trapped in a gigantic cube, made out of smaller cubes, connected by trapdoors. The rooms each have a serial number, a distinct color, and they seem to be arbitrarily booby trapped with gruesome killing machines.
Now, the first thing every mathematician knows, is that things with serial numbers are never arbitrary. Enter Leaven, mathematician, large prime number identifier.
The second thing that every mathematician knows, is that while killing machines are scary in the abstract, bullies are the real silent killer. Enter Quentin, cop, intense look deliverer.
While the actual physical entrapment and big-brother-is-watching torture conspiracy of the movie is pretty chilling, it seems to me that this is more a story about human nature, a la Lord of the Flies, or Das Experiment. As expected, the prisoners slowly unfurl, and traits that seem innocuous at first are magnified in the cube.
The person best equipped to be trapped in the cube is Worth, the nihilist. Being that he believes in nothing, it's very easy for him to sit back, and just relax into cube life without much of a struggle. It's hard to put up a fight when you have nothing to gain or nothing to lose. This same quality, of course, makes him very ill-equipped at escaping the cube. This brings up an interesting question about the role of faith a spirituality in our lives. Strong beliefs in a higher power can be at once motivating, and terrifying. They tend to reassure, but perhaps obscure reason. While religious faith shifts one's focus to the external, it provides a powerful impulse towards self-preservation.
It makes me wonder, in the unfortunate scenario that I be trapped in 3-manifold with or without boundary, what kind of people would I want there with me? Next up, Cube 2: Hypercube.
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Oh my goodness this movie. I saw it while I was living in Mexico and I think it might have been a bit much for my 9th grade brain to handle. I remember my friends and I all hating it but from your description I think we just weren't mature enough to really get it. I'm curious to watch it again and see.
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