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 min
Languages	English, German
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.

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.

Plot summary

Template:Spoiler Seven strangers, of vastly different backgrounds, are dumped inside a maze of cubes, and must find an escape before they die of starvation and dehydration. Their starting cube is connected in six ways to another cube. To make matters worse, each cube, excluding the one each person started in, could be either safe or fatal, the latter type horrifically killing those who enter them.

Six of the seven people in the cube start out fairly close to each other; the seventh person, Alderson, dies during the exposition by being shredded by fine wires. None of the people know how many cubes there are, or why they were put into the maze. The six people join together, reasoning that they will have a better chance at survival if they do so. They each have unique talents which help them along their way. Rennes, the leader, shows the group how to test for traps, having escaped from no less than seven prisons. Testing a cube for traps involves tossing a boot ("booting") into a questionable cube, in hopes that it will trigger a trap. 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 corrosive acid. This ends his role as the group leader. The group extrapolates that the floor may have been pressure sensitive, or the trap thermal activated. They reason they must find a more accurate way to test for traps.

Quentin takes charge immediately, and asks everyone their occupation before they were put into the cube. Holloway was a free clinic doctor, and Quentin was a cop. Worth "does office stuff", and Leaven "hangs out with her friends". Quentin postulates that nothing is left to chance, and questions why Leaven still has her glasses. Leaven remembers that each room had a set of numbers associated with them, and when one of those numbers was prime, a trap was always in that room. Leaven's purpose becomes "cracking the cube's code".

Quentin enters one of the cubes which was assumed to be 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. Leaven also comes to realize that the numbers represent encoded Cartesian coordinates. Worth, who is revealed to have been one of the architects of the cube's outer shell, provides information about the dimensions of that shell (it is 434 feet on a side). In this way, he drops the "office guy" facade and assumes the role of "the poison". Leaven, now given the dimensions, can guess 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 – i.e. each room measures about 16.69 feet on an external side.) 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.)

The group now then make their way safely to one face of the cube, only to discover there is a gap from the door, to the outer shell. Fashioning a rope made from their clothes, Holloway volunteers herself to go outside on the rope and try to see anything. The maze shakes. Holloway nearly falls, but Quentin catches her. He has a good grip on her, but lets her fall to her death. (The others think it was an accident.)

The group needs to rest, so they take an "hour" nap, an hour being as long as Quentin says it is. 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". 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 knows Holloway's death was not an accident.

Quentin tosses Worth down a cube, only to hear Worth laughing hysterically. The cube below turns out to contain Rennes's corpse, indicating they had gone back to where they had started. Worth notices that the room that killed the Wren is no longer adjacent to the room they occupy. He and Leaven realize that the rooms must shift their locations over time.

Leaven soon discerns that the sets of numbers on a cube encode something else besides its traps and current location; the numbers can undergo permutations, and the permutations show how a cube progresses through the maze. After minutes of calculation, Leaven discovers that if they had simply remained in the room in which they met, they would have made it out to the "bridge cube," the cube connecting the outer shell to the inner cubes (although this means that they would never have found Kazan). If they wait for the cube to shift, they will be linked to this bridge cube – and the outside world.

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, an 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 kill Quentin, who has gone mad. Leaven, Worth, and Kazan leave Quentin to die. They navigate the maze and find the bridge cube. Quentin, however, catches up with them and stabs Leaven from behind with a spike taken from the door handle of one of the cubes, likely thinking that it was Worth. Worth and Quentin fight again, and Kazan escapes outside the maze. Quentin grabs Kazan, but Worth grabs Quentin. Stuck between two shifting walls, Quentin is torn in half as the bridge cube shifts back into its starting position, at the bottom of the maze, with Worth and Leaven (whose fate is unclear) still trapped inside and badly wounded. Worth and Leaven will thus be unable to escape until the bridge cube next aligns with the exit (which takes days; therefore they will presumably die inside the cube).

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. The true purpose of this room ends up being revealed in Cube Zero.

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 assemble. 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, especially against women, 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.

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 stomach by Quentin. Quentin 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

Kazan shows his change most simply as being the autistic man who seems left 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 character's 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. 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 detective) 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).

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 us 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.

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

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

Cube series has more details about how this film relates to the other Cube movies.

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.

Related works

• The Probe (episode), the Outer Limits episode that inspired this movie.
• House of 9
• Haze
• Saw
• Saw II
• Phone Booth
• Mindhunters
• "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
• Solitary
• Allegiance: Episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation
• Battle Royale
• Rogue Moon, a novel by Algis Budrys

See also

• Cube series for more details about how this film relates to the other Cube movies.
• List of movies
• Cinema of Canada

External links

• Cube at IMDb