NIKKI says:Back to clearing out the "to-watch" pile. I was in the mood for something scary, possibly a bit lame, and short. This one was perfect. Turns out, though, it was wasn't all that stupid. Well, ultimately, I don't know if it made sense, but it was certainly interesting to watch.
I enjoyed the first Cube, because those claustrophobic, how-did-we-get-here films intrigue me and freak me out. I was expecting this one to be a bit a remake. I thought the box would be the same, but that it would do way more gruesome stuff to the trapped people.
Not at all -- the box was stark white, and it was all about altered reality and time and space. The rules of physics did not apply in the box, and time ran in loops and twists, so that the trapped people this time stumbled upon earlier and later version of themselves in ways that really were genuinely creepy.
Example: All the people stuck in the cube are pressuring the old crazy lady because it sounds like she has knowledge of the company they think might be behind the cube. Izon, or whatever it was. So, just when everyone's like "leave the old woman alone" to the guy from Forever Knight, a panel opens with him holding the old lady by the throat, blood pouring from her mouth. "Don't trust her" he says, and then some part of the cube shifts and cuts his head off. Panel closes.
What? Wha? Whee?
Very cool.
I ended up appreciating that this wasn't a horror film, and more a mind-bender. In the end, there were few answers, but, strangely, that didn't bother me as much as perhaps it should have.
Now, I learn, there's another Cube film -- Cube Zero, which looks to take the idea from maths, to reality, to religion. I'm so there.
2.5/5
STEVE says:
I wasn't so much a fan of the first Cube. To me, the intellectual Indie film came off like a student film with too many ideas and not enough resolution. I much preferred Darren Aronofsky's Pi, which had the same kind of high-mindedness with no resolution, but made such good use of the MacGuffin that, either you didn't notice the fact that you didn't know what it was all about until long after it was over, or you just didn't care.
Cube 2: Hypercube does the same. Nearly. This particular Cube behaves differently from the first, in that not every room is a death trap. Instead, every room is seemingly from a different period in time. Sure, there are death traps here and there, but much more fascinating is a room where our protagonist finds the withered bodies of her companions and herself from a different timeline, or the character Simon who continually meets up with different versions of Jerry who dies and dies again, always eventually meeting up with Simon, who's killed Jerry several times himself. The quantum physics here are never explained, and they don't need to be. It's just part of the Cube.
What I didn't like about this one was the ending. It seems the only purpose for this movie was to set up the sequel, and that left me cold. I actually found myself longing for the ambiguous ending of Cube.
2.5/5
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