Screened "Cube" last weekend
Last weekend I screened all three of the Cube movies for a group of my friends.
(There is no fourth Cube reboot movie. We do not speak of it. It sucks ass and is PG-13 which completely defeats the point of The Cube.)
As part of the screening I prepared a bunch of foldable InfoCube papercrafts containing wikipedia summaries of all three Cube movies, as well as a ReviewCube showing recent reviews of Cube movies from Letterboxd Users.
This is not news to anyone, but the only Cube really and truly worth watching is the original Cube. It is on-the-nose and a bit corny, and every actor in it has a very "performancey" acting style, but it really works, I think.
The things it has to say about the world are naïve in a 90s way... for example, the characters think that there is a meaningful difference between "the military industrial complex" and "billionaires" and argue about which one might have created the Cube. It also has a very 90s distrust of infrastructure projects and nonviolent government services that also doesn't make any sense - the Cube is, at one point, derisively compared to a public works project.
But it wears its heart on its sleeve, it has big things it wants to say, and it mostly wants to say: ACAB. It's a very satisfying watch!
Cube 2 is a mess in every way possible, but it has enough preposterously silly material that we really were not at all bored while watching it. It's not quite "so bad it's good," but it's... on the way there, I guess.
Cube Zero is a definite improvement, but is so scatterbrained and silly that its good ideas kind of drown amongst the bad ones. It has a weirdly steampunk flavor to it that the original Cube completely lacked - there's a bad guy in somewhat olden-timey clothes who has a disgusting robot eye. It flashes with a giant anime-style flash star the first moment he looks at the camera. His two goons hack a computer and weird harpsichord music plays.
These are all in contrast with the (surprisingly amazing) set of the room they spend most of their time in, which has enormously high filing cabinet stacks for walls and an amazing grunge-sci-fi center console that looks like something from the universe of the original Alien film. We also see some scraps of the aboveground world - filled, for some reason, by mind-controlled soldiers with forehead tattoos who can jump many times their own height and are all armed with sniper rifles. The movie is trying to suggest a vast and horrible world just out of frame... but it's a bit too confused to make that concealed world feel coherent. The sci-fi goofiness in the awesome control room set just isn't present aboveground. They feel like two completely separate worlds.
Cube Zero has no core thematic focus at all, really. It wanders from idea to idea kind of at random, resolving none of them. It introduces a half-formed opinion about the relationship between bureaucracy, fascist population control, and a belief in god, but it never follows up on this in a way that makes its opinion clear. There is a scene where a Cube dweller is fried alive for saying he's an atheist, and then the topic is simply never revisited. Very mysterious!
One thing we noticed was that Cube 2 and Cube Zero are so unable to escape the presence of the original Cube that they will reuse character dynamics from the original movie with barely any changes, in an attempt to shortcut their way to the emotional resonance of the first movie. The first movie has a couple key template relationships between characters - a doctor protecting a childlike character, a motherly character in conflict with a violent man - which the writers reused almost exactly in each following film. But they moved so quickly with both of these reused relationships that they are completely juiceless. They even sometimes reuse turns of phrase in a conspicuous, annoying way!
As a game, I had everyone do a "out of 5 stars" rating for each Cube movie, off the cuff, immediately after completing each one. Our watch group rated a universal 4 out of 5 stars, no disagreements. Cube 2: HyperCube got mostly 2s, with an overall rating of 2.25. Cube 3 did somewhat better, at 2.93 out of 5... I think it would have done something closer to 3 if it had not had such a perplexing, fuck-you kind of an ending. (I won't spoil it, but it's ridiculous.)
I'm glad I did this, though! It's been a long time since I watched these movies and I don't think I'd ever seen Cube 2 all the way through before. It's always fun to see the whole of something, even if it sucks. You can learn a lot from shit that sucks.
I learned that good set design can make me forgive a lot of mistakes. The set of the original Cube is one of the best sets in science fiction film, period. And Cube Zero isn't good, but that set rules, so I had a fine time watching it anyway. Someone should steal it for a videogame!!