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Cube (1997 film)
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Wikipedia article
{{Infobox film
| name = Cube
| image = Cube_The_Movie_Poster_Art.jpg
| alt =
| caption = Theatrical release poster
| director = Vincenzo Natali
| producer =
| writer =
| starring =
| music = Mark Korven
| cinematography = Derek Rogers
| editing = John Sanders
| studio = Cube Libre
| distributor =
| released =
| runtime = 90 minutes
| country = Canada
| language = English
| budget = $350,000 CAD
| gross = $8.9 million
}}
'Cube' is a 1997 Canadian independent science fiction horror film directed and co-written by Vincenzo Natali. A product of the Canadian Film Centre's First Feature Project, Nicole de Boer, Nicky Guadagni, David Hewlett, Andrew Miller, Julian Richings, Wayne Robson and Maurice Dean Wint star as individuals trapped in a bizarre and deadly labyrinth of cube-shaped rooms.
'Cube' has gained notoriety and a cult following, for its surreal atmosphere and Kafkaesque setting and concept of industrial, cube-shaped rooms. The film received generally positive reviews and led to a series of films. An American remake, currently on hold, is in development at Lionsgate, and a Japanese remake was released in 2021.
Plot
In a pre-credits sequence, a man (Alderson) dies in a gory manner in a cube-shaped room.
Five desperate people Quentin, Worth, Holloway, Leaven, and Rennes meet in another identical room. None of them knows how or why they have arrived. Quentin, who had been exploring, warns everyone that some rooms contain traps. Rennes, a convict who has escaped seven prisons, assumes the traps are triggered by motion detectors. He tests each room by throwing one of his boots first. The maze is beset by frequent tremors. Leaven notices numbers inscribed into the narrow passageways between rooms. Rennes enters a room that he thinks to be safe and is killed when he is sprayed in the face with acid. This indicates that each trap is triggered by different sensors.
Quentin believes each person was chosen to be there. He is a divorced police officer, Leaven is a young mathematics student, and Holloway is a free clinic doctor. Worth cagily describes himself as an office worker. Leaven hypothesizes that any room marked with a prime number is a trap, and they find an intellectually disabled man named Kazan, whom Holloway insists they bring along. Quentin injures his leg in a trapped room deemed safe by Leaven's calculations. Tensions rise over personal conflicts and the mystery over the maze's purpose. After being provoked by Quentin, Worth admits that he designed the maze's outer shell (also shaped like a cube) for a shadowy and uncaring bureaucracy. He guesses that its original purpose has been forgotten; they have been imprisoned within the maze simply to put it to use.
Worth's knowledge of the outer shell's dimensions allows Leaven to determine that each side of the Cube is 26 rooms across, making 17,576 rooms in total. She realizes that the numbers indicate the Cartesian coordinates of each room. The group moves toward the nearest edge as determined by her theory, but each of the rooms near the outer wall is trapped. Rather than backtrack, they travel silently through a room with a sound-activated trap. After Kazan makes a sound and nearly causes Quentin's death, Quentin threatens Kazan and clashes with Holloway, who defends Kazan and insinuates that Quentin may have been an abusive husband who likes young girls.
When the group reaches the edge, they find a bottomless abyss separating the maze from the outer shell. Holloway volunteers to scout the gap using a rope made out of the group's clothes. Holloway tries to swing towards the outer wall, but another tremor causes the group to lose grip of the rope. Quentin grabs hold of Holloway, but then she falls to her death when Quentin decides to let go of her.
Quentin has become more and more unhinged; he attempts to persuade Leaven to join him in abandoning the others and makes a sexual advance on her. She rejects him. Worth intervenes. Quentin beats him savagely and drops him into another room through a floor hatch. There, the group finds Rennes' corpse: they've wandered in circles. Worth then realizes that the rooms move places throughout the Cube, which is the cause of all the tremors. Leaven also deduces that traps are not tagged by prime numbers, but by powers of prime numbers, and Kazan reveals himself to be an autistic savant who can quickly do prime factorizations mentally. With his help, Leaven guides the group to the bridge room that will lead them out of the maze. Worth ambushes and apparently kills Quentin before leaving him behind. Kazan opens the final hatch, revealing a bright white light, but Worth declines to leave the Cube as he has lost his will to live.
As Leaven tries to convince the guilt-stricken Worth to join her, Quentin reappears, stabs and kills her with a hatch lever. He mortally wounds Worth while Kazan flees. As Quentin moves to kill Kazan, Worth pins Quentin in the narrow passageway as the rooms shift again. Quentin is torn apart. Worth crawls back to Leaven's corpse to die next to her.
Kazan wanders out into the bright light, his fate left unknown.
Cast
The cast featured Canadian actors who were relatively unknown in the United States at the time of the film's release. Each character's name is connected with a real-world prison.
On casting Maurice Dean Wint as Quentin, Natali's cost-centric approach meant he needed to find someone who could play a combined role of hero and villain in a split-personality role. Wint was considered the standout among the cast and was confident that the film would be a breakthrough for the Canadian Film Centre.
Production
Development
An episode of the original 'Twilight Zone' television series, "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" (first aired 22 December 1961), was reportedly an inspiration for the film. Another film which acted as inspiration was Alfred Hitchcock's 'Lifeboat', which was shot entirely in a lifeboat with no actor standing at any point.Director Vincenzo Natali did not have confidence in securing enough money to do a film. Before trying to pitch his idea, he realized that costs could be kept low by using a single set that substituted as many, therefore needing only a single location with the actors moving around. The decision to go with a single set lead to the inspiration to create a film centered around a maze. A set with a cube and a half was built off the floor, to allow the surroundings to be lit from behind all walls of the cube. Natali mentioned that the set itself was the most expensive element of the entire film. Though Natali had the initial inspiration to make a film "set entirely in hell" in 1990, it was not until 1994, when he was working as a storyboard artist's assistant at Canada's Nelvana animation studio, that he had completed the first script for 'Cube'. The initial draft had a more comedic tone and featured surreal images, a cannibal, edible moss growing on the walls, and a monster that roamed the cube. Roommate and childhood filmmaking partner Andre Bijelic helped Natali strip the central idea people avoiding deadly traps in a maze down to its essence. Scenes that took place outside of the cube were jettisoned, and the identity of the victims themselves changed. In some drafts, they were accountants and in others criminals, with the implication being that their banishment to the cube was part of a penal sentence. One of the most important dramatic changes was the complete removal of food and water from the scenario; this created a sense of urgency for escape.
After writing 'Cube', Natali developed and filmed a short entitled 'Elevated'. The short was set in an elevator and was intended to give investors an idea of how 'Cube' would hypothetically look and come across. While working on 'Elevated', cinematographer Derek Rogers developed strategies for shooting in the tightly confined spaces in which he would later work on 'Cube'. The short eventually helped 'Cube' procure financing. 'Cube' was shot on a Toronto soundstage.
Casting started with friends of Natali and budget limitations allowed for just a single day of script reading prior to shooting. As it was filmed relatively quickly with actors who were well prepared, there are no known blooper or outtake reels in existence.
Filming
The film was shot in Toronto, Ontario on a budget of C$350,000 cash in just 21 days, although other sources put the figure at C$375,000. The budget was split between 50% cash and the other 50% as donated services, for a total of C$700,000. Natali considered the cash figure to be deceptive, as they deferred payment on goods and services, while they were able to get the special effects completed at no cost.The warehouse used was situated near a train line and noise generated from the rumbles by passing trains was incorporated into the film as the sound of the cubes moving. To change how each cube looked, some scenes were shot in wide lens, while others may be long lens and lit with different colors, to give the illusion that characters were moving through a maze. Nicole de Boer commented during an interview that the white room was more comforting to actors at the start of a day's filming, compared to the red room which induced psychological effects on the cast during several hours in the confined space.
There were technical problems encountered in getting a crew of 30 into a smaller set alongside the cast of 6, with Natali commenting that it "became a weird fusion between sci-fi and the guerrilla-style approach to filmmaking".
Post production
During post production, Natali spent months "on the aural environment", including adding appropriate sound effects for how he wanted each room to be conveyed to the audience, wanting the feel of the cube to be more like a haunted house.Design and effects
The Cube design
The Cube device in the film was conceived by mathematician David W. Pravica, who also served as the film's math consultant. It consists of an outer cubical shell (the 'sarcophagus') and the inner cube. Each side of the outer shell is long. The inner cube consists of 263 = 17,576 cubical rooms (minus an unknown number of rooms to allow for movement, as shown in the film), each having a side length of . There is a space of between the inner cube and the outer shell. Each room is labelled with three identification numbers, for example, 517 478 565. These numbers encode the starting coordinates of the room and the X, Y, and Z coordinates are the sums of the digits of the first, second, and third number, respectively. The numbers also determine the movement of the room - the subsequent positions are obtained by cyclically subtracting the digits from one another, and the resulting numbers are then successively added to the starting numbers.
Only one cube, with each of its sides measuring in length, was actually built, with only one working door that could actually support the weight of the actors. The colour of the room was changed by sliding panels. Since this was a time-consuming procedure, the film was not shot in sequence; all shots taking place in rooms of a specific color were shot one at a time. It was intended that there would be six colors of rooms to match the recurring theme of six throughout the film; five sets of gel panels, plus pure white. However, the budget did not stretch to the sixth gel panel, and so there are only five room colors in the film. Another partial cube was made for shots requiring the point of view of standing in one room and looking into another.
Release
'Cube' was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival on 9 September 1997 and released in Ottawa and Montreal on 18 September. A theatrical release occurred in Spain in early 1999, while in Italy a release was scheduled for July 1999 and an opening in Germany was set for later that year. In the Japanese market, it became the top video rental at the time, and exceeded expectations, with co-writer Graeme Manson suggesting people in Japan had a better understanding of living in boxes so resonated better with the Japanese audience, as they were likely "more receptive to the whole metaphor underlying the film".
The film made it's television debut in the United States on 24 July 1999 on the Sci-Fi channel.
Reception
Box office
In its home country of Canada, the film was a commercial failure, lasting only a few days in Canadian theatres. Despite this, French film distributor Samuel Hadida's company Metropolitan Filmexport saw potential in the film and spent $1.2 million in a marketing campaign, posting flyers in many cities and flying members of the cast over to France to meet moviegoers. At its peak, the film was shown at 220 French box offices and became among the most popular films in France of that time, collecting over $10 million in box office receipts. It went on to be the second-highest grossing film in France that summer.Elsewhere internationally, the film grossed $501,818 in the United States, and $8,479,845 in other territories, for a worldwide total of $8,981,663.
Critical response
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 'Cube' holds an approval rating of 64%, based on 39 reviews, and an average rating of 6.3/10. The website's consensus reads: "'Cube' sometimes struggles with where to take its intriguing premise, but gripping pace and an impressive intelligence make it hard to turn away". On Metacritic, the film has a score 61 out of 100, based on 12 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".Bob Graham of the 'San Francisco Chronicle' was highly critical: "If writer-director Vincenzo Natali, storyboard artist for Keanu Reeves's 'Johnny Mnemonic', were as comfortable with dialogue and dramatizing characters as he is with images, this first feature of his might have worked better". Nick Schager from 'Slant Magazine' rated the film three out of five stars, noting that, while it had an intriguing premise and initially chilling mood, it was undone by threadbare characterizations, and lack of a satisfying explanation for the cube's existence. He concluded the film "winds up going nowhere fast".
Anita Gates of 'The New York Times' was more positive, saying the story "proves surprisingly gripping, in the best 'Twilight Zone' tradition. The ensemble cast does an outstanding job on the cinematic equivalent of a bare stage... Everyone has his or her own theory about who is behind this peculiar imprisonment... The weakness in 'Cube' is the dialogue, which sometimes turns remarkably trite... The strength is the film's understated but real tension. Vincenzo Natali, the film's fledgling director and co-writer, has delivered an allegory, too, about futility, about the necessity and certain betrayal of trust, about human beings who do not for a second have the luxury of doing nothing". Bloody Disgusting gave a positive review: "Shoddy acting and a semi-weak script can't hold this movie back. It's simply too good a premise and too well-directed to let minor hindrances derail its creepy premise". Kim Newman from Empire Online gave the film 4/5 stars, writing: "Too many low-budget sci-fi films try for epic scope and fail; this one concentrates on making the best of what it's got and does it well".
Accolades
The film won the award for Best Canadian First Feature Film at the 1997 Toronto International Film Festival and the Jury Award at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film.
Trilogy and remakes
After 'Cube' achieved cult status, it was followed by a sequel, 'Cube 2: Hypercube', released in 2002, and a prequel, 'Cube Zero', released in 2004.
In April 2015, 'The Hollywood Reporter' wrote that Lionsgate Films was planning to remake the film, under the title 'Cubed', with Saman Kesh directing, Roy Lee and Jon Spaihts producing and a screenplay by Philip Gawthorne, based on Keshs original take.
A Japanese remake, also called 'Cube', was released in October 2021.
Legacy
The song '(Trapped Inside) The Cube', by Brazilian Thrash Metal band Blasthrash, is loosely based on the movie plot.
See also
* 'The Library of Babel'
* 'Saw (2004 film)'
References
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