The coolest thing outta Canada since Devin Townsend
Wow! I'd heard good things about this movie, but few of them touched on how strikingly good a movie this really is. I'm kind of miffed at myself that I didn't see it earlier.
I don't want to explain too much about the setup, so I'll make clear just what's in the first minute or so. Six people (well, seven, but...) wake up in their own separate strange, cube-shaped rooms. There are small, square, sliding doorways in the center of each wall, the ceiling, and the floor. And beyond those doorways is, in each case, another cube (differently colored). Why they're there, we're not told, and it doesn't matter because all that matters is that, understandably, they wants out, and unfortunately, a number of those chambers are equipped with very lethal boobytraps. (anyone else reminded of that Star Trek episode where Captain Picard is squirreled away in that alien prison with the three other aliens of different species?)
No time-setting is given or implied here (except we know that it's after 1974 from a certain James Bond reference), but the outlandish nature of some of the traps give the film a sci-fi tone. Each of the people we meet have a trait, a skill, or some knowledge that makes them useful to the survival of the group, and each also has something that will hinder them. There's the expected bickering, and some unexpected bickering, but it's clear that nobody's going to get out solo, if anybody can get out at all.
Filmed almost entirely on one set (lit with different colors to give the impression of a different room) for about a third of a million Canadian dollars (maybe $225K US), not for a moment does Cube look or sound like anything less than a totally professional film. The set is evocative, the effects (for their few shots) are REALLY excellent (for what it shows, you wouldn't have seen a better intro-sequence punch-line effect in the biggest-budgeted Hollywood movie – I understand they were donated), and the cast makes excellent work of the good material they're given.
A lot of the standard introductory material I quite expected is mercifully expunged here. There are no lengthy sequences of people standing around yelling "Hello? Is anybody there?". There isn't a lot of blather about how it's not fair. Praise must be given to the writers (Vincenzo Natali, Andre Bijelic and Graeme Manson) for penning such a simple yet clever story with some interesting characters. As for the actors, everybody's good, particularly Maurice Dean Wint and Nicole "Ezri Dax" de Boer.
Directed by Natali (his first feature), all the material is handled with a surety that we often don't see from directors decades into their games. As with The Blair Witch Project, it's the fear of what MIGHT be that is exploited here, not shock or revulsion of what's on the screen at the moment. Note the excruciatingly tense scene where our group must cross a chamber in which they must be completely silent; the movie was 2/3 over by the time I stopped cringing every time somebody stepped into a new cube!
A couple plot points can be seen a little ways off – for example, one look around the passages between the chambers should cue you in to one plot development. No biggie though, it's how that development might be overcome that's really clever. Another development late in the film when one character very suddenly announces a previously unmentioned skill feels contrived, but just remember, these people weren't picked at random. Likewise, another character's one-eighty in personality has often been criticized as arbitrary, but again, if you were selecting people to put in this maze, would you have picked a total angel for this person? Some might be put off by the narrative's staunch refusal to reveal or explain the reasons behind these circumstances, but not I, since I never really expected any enlightenment. In this case, the why is very far beside the point.
If I have any strong reservation about Cube, it's the over-the-top, totally unnecessary violence in the conclusion, which is not only mean-spirited and pointless (I know, I know – the SITUATION is mean-spirited and pointless), but it doesn't make a lot of sense. Shouldn't this person have been lost, totally helpless to steer through the maze? Ah, well – my reservation isn't strong enough to dent my enthusiasm for this film.
Bottom line, this is the best movie I've rented in quite some time, in any genre. And there's a whole lot of "the prisoners are us!" symbolism if you want to get into that, I don't. Just see it.
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