Ah... summer. Though some series (Monk, Stargate: SG-1 are just picking up again, most are on hiatus which means fewer things appearing at the top of Tivo's Now Playing list. A perfect time to catch up on movies saved from premium channel preview weekends earlier in the year.
Tonight: Cube 2: Hypercube. This is the sequel to Cube, a provocative low budget allegory for the pointlessness of society and the inability of individuals within it to work together towards a common goal. Plus, it has the coolest pre-title teaser ever. The story goes something like this: a bunch of random people-- an autistic savant, an attactive woman, a burly dullard, an egghead, and the rest of the usual stereotypes-- wake up inside a cube full of ever-shifting, identical cubical rooms. Some rooms are safe. Others are deathtraps (in the purest D&D sense of the term). As they grapple with what the Cube is and why they're there, they must work together to figure out how to escape.
The story in Cube 2 goes something like this: a bunch of random people-- a blind genius, an attractive woman, a burly dullard, an egghead, and the rest of the usual stereotypes-- wake up inside a hypercube full of identical cubical rooms. Some force inside the Hypercube occasionally manifests itself with deadly results. As they grapple with what the Hypercube is and why they're there, they must work together to figure out how to escape.
Now where have I heard that before?
The acting in Cube 2 is (a little) better than in the first, and the effects are (a little) improved. The other changes are all for the worse. Neither film has much of a plot, but the first film had a puzzle at its core and an allegory as its structure. You also never knew if the room they were entering was going to be safe or deadly-- and you hoped it'd be deadly, to see what nifty new way they thought of to kill someone. Cube 2 has none of that going for it. The Cube in the first film was a complete mystery. We never find out who built it or why, and that's a large part of the point. The sequel gives all the victims a common connection that strains logic, tells us exactly who built the Hypercube and why, and offers an X-Files-ish ending that punctuates the movie with an elipsis instead of an exclamation point, or even a question mark.
Where the first movie really had no plot, this one really makes no sense.
Posted by Peter at June 22, 2003 12:30 AM