May 1, 2007

• Movie: Hypercube (Cube 2)

  There was this movie called Cube, which I’m pretty sure I wrote about here.

  Cube was pretty good, for a low-budget high-concept walk through the darker reaches of existentialism. Sort of a nihilistic torture chamber version of the Twilight Zone, where each character is a stand-in for an aspect of the psyche, and how all must set aside their divergent motives, work together, and solve the puzzle. And the puzzle is a stand-in for existence. Plus it had Ezri Dax, and some other Canadian actors who went on to do well in Hollywood.

  So it was a good thing, if not a happy movie to bring a date.

  Hypercube takes the same basic idea, and screws it up. There’s no philosophy, it’s not an allegory for anything, it’s just a bunch of people who are loosely connected to a defense contractor, who’ve been sent in to a pan-dimensional, spacetime-bending torture chamber to die.

  In both films, the titular Cube is a series of cube-shaped rooms connected by doorways on all sides. Some rooms are traps, some rooms are not. All look the same. And they might be moving, rearranging themselves. In Hypercube, there’s the added idea that some cubes move in time as well, or that some speed up time or slow it down, and that gravity works differently in different cubes. None of this is really explored, though. I can think of a couple of interesting scenarios this might yield, but apparently I’m more creative than the scriptwriters.

  Anyway. Avoid.

  There’s also a prequel out, called Cube Zero. I almost got it instead, but the DVD cover had more gore than I was looking for. No, just existential dread for me, thanks.

  • 4:49 am
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