Fade in and we see a bald, skinny guy dressed in baggy green clothes, just waking up. He stands and finds himself inside a square room, with the floor, ceiling and all four walls looking the same - a pattern of panels with a door in the middle. He checks a few of these safe-like doors and sees identical rooms on the other side, save for a different color lighting in each. He goes through one of the doors into the next room. After a moment there is a huge wooshing sound and then the guy falls apart into a pile of well sliced segments. After his body crumbles, a frame with criss-crossing wires swings back and folds up into the ceiling. And that's all before the titles!
The opening sequence of Cube is haunting and it only gets better from here. We gradually meet several other people, all dressed the same, all confused as to where they are, and how and why they got there. There's the cop, who naturally takes charge of the group. The bleeding-heart liberal female doctor. The frightened young female student. The sarcastic, nihilistic guy. The prison escape artist. The retarded guy. They make their way through this maze, trying to avoid "traps" and find a way out. The student turns out to be a math whiz, which helps when the group discovers a numbering system to the rooms. But is the system really what they think it is? That's what really makes this work - they don't really know...anything! They don't even really know what the cube is. Or do they? Or do we? This element of mystery is played well and the plot keeps twisting and turning.
I don't really want to give too many plot points away because I really enjoyed this movie and hope you check it out sometime.
While it may seem that this could be a dull, overacted set piece, with lots of conversations between these different people, who find out more about themselves and each other in the face of danger, with lots of allegory and moral lessons, it is not. Instead, it is a smart, tense action thriller. Sure there are a few spots where the characters talk, and butt heads, and we find out a bit about their different backgrounds, but that is well-balanced with a lot of tense situations, action and suspense.
For you scorekeepers out there, there are no nude scenes, but there are several super-gross-out scenes chock full of flesh-eating acid, blood and gore. This is not a gorefest by far, but the gore it does show is killer.
The amazing thing about this is that 90% of it was probably shot on one set (two of the cube rooms - they could have just re-lit each one with a different color each time the characters were to be in another room), and yet it doesn't seem like a small movie. The way it is shot and the pace that the movie moves at really give a sense of being lost in an endless array of rooms. The music is minimal and is mostly just odd synthesizer moans and mechanical noises.
I really enjoyed this one. Dr. Squid says check it out.
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