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Cube Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 41 Reviews)

Wonderful Idea - Poor Execution
This is an interesting movie in many ways. The basic theme is fantastic. A number of individuals are somehow abducted and placed in a giant Rubiks cube in essence. Supposedly there are thousands of rooms in the structure, each room with six exits and may containing lethal traps. The idea is to figure out which rooms have traps and which rooms lead to the exit. Another twist is that the rooms also move on a regular basis. I am not sure if the movie concept is original to this film or has been taken from somewhere else but it was enough to make me want to see it without any reviews from elsewhere. Where the movie fails terribly is in the story. Instead on being able to follow this group as they heroically try to escape this fiendish trap the film shows the characters fighting and killing each other. I understand that being trapped in this situation would be stressful for anybody but I think that most people would want to escape rather than assaulting and murdering their fellow prisoners. The movie focuses on this conflict rather than their environment or the attempt to escape. One of the character essentially goes "postal"; this almost makes the movie just another typical violent gorefest. The brilliant premise of the movie and the environment are not exploited to anywhere near their potential. I would much rather have had a plot line where there was of course stress amongst the characters but they were still able to work together. Thus I give the movie 3 stars for a novel and outstanding concept but zero for the actual film.

A Pleasant Surprise...
....we'll get to that in a minute.

First - the movie "Cube":

Somewhat disappointing to me, it started out great though. The special effects were excellent, and the traps were extremely scary. But the problem is that it only showed a few traps being set off, and all those were in the first half of the movie. The rest of the movie focused more on the paranoia, fear, and desperation of the remaining characters. And shows what each character has to offer to help the others escape.

Not a bad movie at all, I'd give it 3 or 4 stars. The reason I gave this DVD 5 stars? That's the pleasant surprise.

On the second side of this DVD it had ANOTHER movie - "Love and a .45"
I would have bought it separately if I had seen it earlier. But as luck would have it I got it for free. Look it up here or at imdb.com for more info on that movie, I'm not going to do a review for it here, sorry.

So this was definitely worth buying for me. 2 good movies for the price of 1 !!

Visually interesting; lacks suspense or credible acting.
In the world of independent horror, "Cube" ranks as a success and a failure. The production value of the film is much more sophisticated and expensive, but with the banal characterization, lugubrious dialogue and a complete absence of tension or suspense, it becomes morose and draggy, a time-waster that fails to deliver much of anything.

The film opens with a disturbing scene in which a man, trapped in a square room with a single door on each wall, enters into another room and becomes divided into identical pieces. As we leave this grotesque scene, we enter another room, where a group of people are waking up to find themselves trapped in a maze, with time running against them as they must find their way to the outer shell of the superstructure and escape before dying from malnourishment.

The individuals among them are not that intriguing: there's edgy cop Quentin (Maurice Dean Wint), who takes charge of their quest; Worth (David Hewlett), who knows more about the structure than he's willing to tell; Leaven (Nicole de Boer), whose skills in mathematics serve to help them find which rooms are safe; Holloway (Nicky Guadagni), part humanitarian, part feminist; and a retard who causes more trouble than he prevents.

Throughout the course of this bland story, the dialogue serves little other purpose than to give us the illusion that something interesting is at hand. From a convoluted explanation for the cube's existence to the various stages of schizophrenia that begin to warp their minds as they find one another unbearable, there is nothing that ever really grabs our attention.

The so-called action itself is never quite action, either, composed primarily of our group making their way through the rooms, solving different puzzles only to be perplexed by new ones, and a few incidental and purposeful deaths that aren't shocking, only ludicrous due to the fact that the story sets each one character up to live or die before the end comes. There are no surprises to be had, and even the few plot twists concerning the numerical meanings connected to the rooms are as bland as baby food.

There is one memorable scene, as our group comes across a sound-activated room that, when disturbed, becomes a living pincushion. Each person must exercise extreme silence when going through to the next room, and the scene has the prominence of being the sole scene charged with any amount of energy or suspense. This scene gives off the impression that "Cube" has the makings of a better movie, but fails to capitalize on it.

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