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Cube

© Steve Honeywell

Sometimes, a movie sneaks through without a lot of fanfare that really deserves a little more attention than it got. Such a movie is Cube, a Canadian film that arrived on the low-budget scene about four years ago and never really got any sort of attention. It's a shame, too, because Cube is one of the most interesting science fiction movies of the last 10 years. It's not as flashy as The Matrix or as exciting as some of the other high budget films that have shown up recently. But its low budget does not detract. The lack of name actors does not detract. The lack of a significant plot does not detract. In fact, virtually everything about this movie recommends itself to repeated viewing.

Like I said, there is no real plot. The movie starts with the appearance of a single man walking through a series of cube-shaped rooms with a single door in each surface, including the floor and the ceiling. He opens a few doors, walks forward into one room, and is quickly diced into a collection of small bits by a grid of razor wire. Welcome to Cube.

Following this, we are introduced to the bulk of the characters who will be running through the Cube of the title. As they move from room to room, we learn a little about them. The self-appointed leader, Quentin, is a cop. He's joined by Rennes, an escape expert, Leaven, a student with a gift for math, Worth, who knows more than he lets on, and Holloway, a free-clinic doctor and full-time conspiracy theorist.

As they move from room to room in the Cube, they learn a little about the way it works and how to discover the traps that exist in some of the rooms. That's really it. They search for an exit, and for meaning as they journey. Much of the insight they discover comes in the form of the discovery of serial numbers on the rooms. Each discovery with the numbers leads to more and more involved mathematical principles. They lost me eventually, and where they get to ultimately is never fully explained. However, even a full explanation would have likely left me sitting mute--I'm not one for math. So, while the higher math detracts a little, it detracts less than a full lecture on plotting shifting points in three-dimensional space would. So once again, the filmmakers did this right.

I won't spoil the story here. There's too much that's done well and too much that really needs to be viewed. This is a movie about the characters themselves, and about how their time in the Cube changes them. As a piece strictly about characterization, this movie is a prime example of why to watch movies in the first place. The people are intelligent and interesting, and as they devolve slowly into desperation and madness, their true inner selves are revealed, often with surprising results.