A review submitted to rec.arts.movies.reviews of CUBE (1997)
Review written by Mr Q. Z. Diablo
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Mr Diablo has been long awaiting the opening of CUBE in his home town. He had heard about it through an acquaintance and was struck by the originality of its premise. Having stumbled across the title in the local paper, he saddled up and made his way to the local art-house cinema in order to partake of an evening's entertainment. Despite the fact that aspects of the film have been lambasted by several critics, Mr Diablo was enthusiastic about the venture so he picked his way through the gloom of the sparsely populated theatre in order to place himself in an optimal viewing position.
CUBE is a science fiction film with horror overtones regarding a group of people who have been placed, for reasons that they do not understand, in a gigantic structure consisting of a large number (over 17000, as the cast repeatedly reminded Mr Diablo) of interlocking cubes. Each cube contains six doors leading to adjacent cubes, some of which are equipped with deadly booby traps (the nature of one of which is illustrated in the startlingly executed opening scene). None of the protagonists remember how they came to be inside the titular edifice and nor are they aware of what purpose is served by their plight. Given these facts, it seems imminent that they find a way out, which they attempt to do.
The first thing that struck Mr Diablo about CUBE was how good the film looked, considering the low budget. He is saddened to note that $1000000 is considered a minuscule budget in these overblown times but, nonetheless, CUBE looks far more lavish than he would have possibly expected for such a sum. CUBE is director Vincenzo Natali's first feature and Mr Diablo suggests that Mr Natali will be a talent to watch over the next few years. The set (and there is only really one of them) is far and away the star of the show and, in itself, lends an air of claustrophobic desperation to the proceedings. Mr Diablo regards this as a very good thing as he has gripes regarding several other aspects of the film that would have sunk it were it not for its stylistic strengths.
Mr Diablo's first niggle concerns the dialogue. The small audience was observed to giggle disturbingly frequently as idiotic lines were followed by even more idiotic speeches. Maurice Dean Wint playing Quentin, a policeman, is heard to claim that his job is to "see through people - like X-rays" on a number of occasions. It almost seems that scriptwriters Natali, Andre Bijelic and Graeme Manson have imposed dialogue on characters who have had no previous existence outside the time span covered by the film. One does not develop a character by having an actor mouth said character's every waking thought - audiences come to understand portrayals through observing a number of things about an actor's performance; mannerisms, reactions to situations and so forth. It is simply not necessary to spell things out to even the dimmest cinema goers.
The dialogue is so bad, in fact, that it had moments of making Mr Diablo feel almost sorry for any cast expected to recite it. Almost any cast, anyway. In most cases, the performances are almost amateurish. Attempts at terse exchanges between the macho Quentin and the neurotic Holloway (a doctor, played by Nicky Guadagni) are laughably overwrought. While there is no stereotyping according to race, occupation or anything similarly obvious, the characters represent certain personality types and most of the cast seem incapable of instilling any kind of nuance into their performances in order to expand their personas. Mr Wint and Ms Guadagni seem also to equate the depth of feeling that their characters have regarding certain ideas with a compulsion to deliver their lines at extremely high volume. After only a short while, Mr Diablo found himself reflexively cringing every time these two worthies even looked like they were going to engage in any kind of discourse, no matter how brief. On a more positive note, the performance of Andrew Miller as the intellectually disabled Kazan is very convincing, although Mr Diablo's lack of knowledge regarding autism and related conditions prevents him from making a truly informed judgement. Nicole de Boer playes a nervous school student as blandly as can be imagined and David Hewlett turns in an overwhelmingly uninspiring performance as a former office worker with a dark secret. Wayne Robson's turn as the escape artist, Holloway, is fairly difficult to evaluate owing to his early and gruesome demise.
Mr Diablo's last major problem with CUBE was the research put into key aspects of the script. A large component of the resolution of the film is to do with prime numbers (don't ask Mr Diablo to explain this - he feels that it is a major spoiler). Leaven, the edgy but mathematically gifted student, when asked whether a number (say, 765) is prime umms and aahs almost interminably before announcing that the number is not prime. She then proceeds to factor it as 51 x 15. This is all very well but any student of mathematics, however indifferent (and Mr Diablo is a fair measure more indifferent than most), knows that a number ending in 5 is never prime because it may be divided by five. Mr Diablo found very quickly that he had to bite his tongue quite whenever any of the "mathematical" sequences occurred in order to avoid annoying the black-clad, trendy clientele of the cinema by yelling out the answers.
Despite its obvious flaws, CUBE is not a bad film. Mr Diablo particularly liked the baroque look of the sets (as alluded to before), which brought to mind aspects of Clive Barker's overrated HELLRAISER and its (superior) sequels. Some of the CGI work is astounding, producing spikes, razor-sharp wires and endless-seeming shafts descending into the bowels of the earth completely convincingly. The make-up effects, which are extremely well executed, complement the sets and CGI perfectly in contributing to the impression of hopeless panic at which Mr Natali appears to be aiming.
Mr Diablo was also impressed with the camerawork which is, by and large, both interesting and restrained. Most shots of the action are taken with the camera at an angle of 15 degrees or so above the performers, giving the impression that they are somehow being observed by some unknown entity. The use of dissolves to denote the passage of time is not nearly as irritating as Mr Diablo usually finds it but he would prefer that film makers realised that it just looks plain hokey.
CUBE recalls, in concept, Satre's _No_Exit_ and could have been executed more competently than it was. Mr Diablo was grateful, however, to be given a science fiction morsel that attempted to provoke thought in its audience - a perfect panacea for the hype of EPISODE I - THE PHANTOM MENACE, which he has not yet been brave enough to see, owing to the legions of dweebs from all walks of life who still populate cinema foyers, replete with plastic light sabres and clad from head to toe in hessian potato sacks. CUBE misfires in several important departments but when it comes down to sheer, raw style it manages to attain a pretty convincing thumbs up. Let's hope that Mr Vincenzi can find some decent writers and go on to produce bigger and better things in the next few years - genre cinema is desperately in need of talents such as his. In the interim, Mr Diablo will hold off from viewing the first of the STAR WARS prequels and consider the purchase of a VCR to ease the horror drought that seems to be afflicting the filmgoing public at present.
Mr Q. Z. D. -- ----- "Now we see the violence inherent in the sysadmin!"
http://131.217.125.76/qzd/
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