Cube (movie)

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Movie
German title Cube
Original title Cube
Country of production Canada
original language English
Publishing year 1997
length about 87 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Vincenzo Natali
script Ernie Barbarash ,
André Bijelic ,
Graeme Manson ,
Vincenzo Natali
production Mehra Meh ,
Betty Orr
music Mark Korven
camera Derek Rogers
cut John Sanders
occupation
synchronization
chronology

Successor  →
Cube 2: Hypercube

Cube (. English for dice ) is a Canadian science fiction - horror film by director Vincenzo Natali from 1997. The film drew the continuation Cube 2: Hypercube (2002) and the prequel Cube Zero (2004) to be.

content

Six people, who do not know each other, wake up in the middle of a building made of a collection of cubes , some of which contain deadly traps. They don't know how they got there. To get out, they have to work together, but because of the exceptional situation in which they find themselves, they soon get into interpersonal conflicts. The German premiere took place during the Berlinale on February 19, 1998.

action

The characters involved wake up one after the other, each one at first alone, in a cube-like room with an edge length of around five meters. There are hatches on every wall of the room (including the floor and ceiling) through which one can get into the adjacent rooms. Some of the dice contain deadly traps.

The opening scene shows a man named Alderson, who wakes up alone in a cube and first looks at the adjoining rooms through the hatches. When he decides to enter one of the neighboring rooms, he is cut into pieces by a (for the time being) invisible, sharp grid and is killed.

In the course of the film's plot, six prisoners find themselves together and consider why they were caught and how they can escape. First, they test every cube they want to step on by throwing a boot into it. However, this method does not prove to be sufficiently safe and Rennes, one of the prisoners, dies in a trap that sprays acid on his face.

There are signs with three three-digit numbers on the hatches of each die. Leaven, a math student, tries to interpret this information. Your first conclusion is that a cube is a trap if and only if one of its three numbers is prime .

Leaven later discovers that the numbers represent Cartesian coordinates . Worth, who turns out to be one of the architects of the outer shell, gives her information about the dimensions of this shell (135 meters edge length). Leaven can calculate that the entire building has a maximum of 26 rooms in each dimension. With the help of the coordinates, she can calculate that the group is only seven rooms away from the outer shell.

You manage to get to one side of the cube. Using a rope from their clothes, they rappel Holloway, the doctor, on the outer wall of the large cube, perhaps to find a way out. Holloway almost crashes, but is initially caught by Quentin, the apparently good-natured policeman. Quentin, who had previously had a heated argument with Holloway, in the course of which she violently attacked his trust and belief in authority over the government, to which Holloway was responsible for the Cube project, lets her fall to her death (first he tells the others, it would have slipped). As a result, Quentin begins making sexual advances to Leaven. Quentin and Worth then fight a bloody fight.

They encounter Rennes' dead body and notice that they have returned to the vicinity of their original starting space. At first, they believe they have been going in circles, but Worth realizes that the room that killed Rennes is no longer across from their own room. He and Leaven notice that the rooms change their position over time. This also explains the permanent background noise and vibrations caused by the movement of the cubes.

Leaven soon realizes that the number combinations on the dice contain more than information about safety and current position: they also indicate the permutations that each individual cube goes through as it moves within the large cube. After a few minutes of calculation, Leaven discovers that they would have reached the "bridge" if they had just stayed in the cube where they met. The "bridge" is a single cube that connects the outer shell with the inner cubes. When they wait for the cube to move, they will be connected to the bridge - and the outside world. Your conclusion that spaces with non-prime numbers are safe turns out to be false. In fact, the deadly dice are those whose numbers are powers of a prime . From this discovery onward, the prisoners began to perform prime factorization of three-digit numbers. They discover that Kazan, an autistic genius, can do such factories in his head.

Leaven, Worth and Kazan leave Quentin and reach the bridge. Quentin catches up with her and murders Leaven. Worth and Quentin fight again. Quentin is killed when he is caught between the cube corridor and the outer shell as the bridge cube starts moving. Worth is seriously wounded in the bridge cube trapped and will not be able to escape. Only Kazan escapes alive, the outside world cannot be seen, and he slowly walks into a bright light.

Actor and dubbing

role actor German speaker
Quentin (policeman) Maurice Dean Wint Crock Krumbiegel
Joan Leaven (math student) Nicole de Boer Melanie Manstein
Helen Holloway (doctor) Nicky Guadagni Marina Koehler
David Worth (architect) David Hewlett Michael Roll
Kazan (presumably autistic) Andrew Miller Philipp Brammer
Rennes (escape) Wayne Robson Fred Maire
Alderson Julian Richings NN

background

  • Despite its limited budget of approximately $ 365,000 Canadian dollars (the film was shot on a stage only 14 × 14 feet (4.3 × 4.3 meters) in Toronto ; the room color was changed by sliding panels) and the fact that It started as an independent film , Cube achieved considerable commercial success and has now achieved a kind of cult status as a niche science fiction title on the border between thriller and splatter film.
  • The film's special charm lies in its surreal setting. Although reference is made to the world outside, it only appears very abstractly as black emptiness or bright white light.
  • The film shows parallels to Jean-Paul Sartre's play Closed Society and Samuel Beckett's prose text The Orphan .

All characters have been named after prisons:

Reviews

The lexicon of international films judged that the film was an “attractive, exciting and radical cinema experiment” , despite “logical breaks” .

Remake

In the second quarter of 2015, Lionsgate was planning a remake of the Canadian sci-fi thriller about a claustrophobic survival trip entitled "Cubed". The exact release date has not yet been announced.

Awards (selection)

Sitges Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic de Catalunya 1998:

Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival 1999:

  • Silver raven

Genie Awards 1999:

  • Nominations in five categories

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cube on synchronkartei.de, accessed on August 12, 2012
  2. ^ Shape of the cube and number of rooms ( memento from January 30, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on August 12, 2012
  3. ^ Cube. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed September 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 

Web links