I RENTED THE MOVIE CUBE

i rented the movie cube the other day. this is probably to the coolest sf flick i never heard of. the only way i found out about it was through the actress Nicole deBoer. the death of Jadzia Dax at the end of the last season of stds9 sort of attracted me back to the series, so i watched the first episode of this season, and was somewhat surprised to find out that the new host of the Dax symbiant was actually going to have a major part in the series, that new host being Ezri Dax, played by Nicole deBoer. i recognized her face and i had a haunting suspicion that she was on the failed scifi network series Mission Genesis, of which I had watched the premier and let loose a resounding “meh”. so i did a little net searching and confirmed my suspicion. i also found an interview w/ deBoer and she mentioned just having finished working on cube. i basically thought it was another cheesy, low-budget scifi network made-for-tv schlepola movie, so i disregarded it. then the other day, the infamous eric “clowns are funny” kook told me he’d seen cube and it was actually really good. so i rented it and was impressed.

not that you care about any of that, so here’s the review. there’s this massive cube made up of a whole bunch of cube-shaped rooms (like a rubik’s cube but bigger). each room has a hatch on each of it’s walls which leads to another room. some of the rooms are rigged with deadly traps, like human-sized piano wire egg cutters and acid sprays. a bunch of people find themselves together in one room of the cube and try to find their way out.

not an extremely complex plot. but what’s great about this movie are the character types, interactions, and the paranoid terror and tension. each character a different philosophy on life. there’s your typical alpha male: he’s a cop, he’s proactive, violent, he automatically asserts himself as the leader, and his philosophy is that the best plan is to move from room to room and try to find a way out, to focus on the task ahead. there’s a beta male (that’s probably not even a legit term): he believes there is no way out of the cube, he’s a nihilist, he’s lazy, he’s weaker than the alpha male but smarter. there’s a bleeding heart liberal female: she doesn’t want to sacrifice people, and she wants to understand the big picture (why they’re in the cube, who put them there, etc). and there’s a retarded guy and deBoer, who’s a high school match wiz. and there’s a guy who specializes in breaking out of prisons, but he dies in the first ten minutes (no surprises there).

it’s great assessing these people as the band of monkeys they are, since the more the tension grows, the more their true natures are revealed. the alpha male doesn’t like the liberal, the beta male doesn’t like the alpha male, the nerd is …. well, not so easily categorized, but she is useful.

>also, the entire movie is just one set and some computer graphics, since all the rooms are the same (except for the color of the walls, which i think are changed via back lighting). you gotta respect that. the music is really appropriate, too.

some one @ imdb.com called this movie “intriguing but vague.” he complains about some lack of resolution and some scenes that seemed to have no purpose (i’m trying not to give anything important away). now, as associates of mine well know, i’m no fan of vague movies, but cube really wasn’t that vague. as far as lack of resolution, you’ll realise that this si simply a necessity when you see it. much like the truman show, the movie isn’t about the escape. it’s about the characters trying to make the escape. and most “unexplained” acts can pretty easily be chalked up to the characters’ breakdown to primal instincts.

i only have a few minor qualms with this movie: the nerd is too much a teenager (”like, duh”), the liberal is just annoying (not cuz she’s liberal, just cuz she is), and some of the revelations are a little too predictable, but these are just stupid complaints. it really is a good movie. scary too. go rent it. eees guuuud.