What would happen if you awoke one day to discover yourself confined inside a puzzle prison? The only way they could save themselves was to recall math teachings. Cube’s protagonists are in a similar, but even more dangerous, scenario. Cube had only 16 cinemas when it debuted in 1997, yet it quickly became a cult favorite. The film’s enormous success prompted both a sequel and a prequel.
Cube is one of the few low-budget science fiction thrillers that satisfies the audience’s need for visual opulence. When a group of strangers finds themselves in a mystery room with no idea how they got there, they must find a method to get out in order to survive. The group’s fate is in the hands of an adolescent, a cop, a doctor, an architect, an escape artist, and a human computer, who have no idea who set up the death trap or why they were chosen as the inmates. Today, we are going to delve into the Cube franchise’s tales and try to figure out what is going on.
Cube (1997)
“Cube” opens with a man waking up in a strange cube-shaped room with glowing walls. The room has six doors located at the center of each wall, floor, and ceiling. He opens two of the doors and finds them similar but different in color. He enters through the third door and takes a look around before being sliced into tiny cubes by a rack of crosshatched wires. Later, several people come across each other in another room. Quentin the cop appears to be the most optimistic of the lot. He believes that his children give him a purpose in life and for them, he needs to escape. Worth has a nihilistic outlook towards life and chooses to stay silent most of the time.
Holloway is a doctor and thinks it’s the government who has locked them in but Quentin thinks it’s the pastime of a psychotic billionaire. Rennes is an escape artist who figures out which rooms are boobytrapped by throwing his boot in them, with whose help the group wades through other rooms. Leaven is a scared teenager who doesn’t understand what’s happening. Rennes ends up entering a room with dry air where acid is squirted onto his face. The others try to rescue him but the acid melts his face off and he dies.
The incident makes them realize there’s more to the entrapped rooms than motion detectors and they need to find an alternative strategy to figure out which rooms are safe. Quentin is of the opinion that all of them were put together to see how they manage to escape. While catching up about their life outside the cube the group realizes that Leaven excels at math. She notices numbers engraved on all doors and the rooms marked with prime numbers are booby-trapped. The group passes through numerous rooms with Leaven’s help. While checking another space, Kazan falls through the ceiling.
He appears to be differently-abled and Quentin sees him as a liability. However, Holloway protects Kazan and it causes a rift between her and Quentin. After Quentin enters a room with a composite number where he barely escapes from being turned into sushi, Leaven realizes that her prime number theory is incorrect. Quentin begins to suspect Worth to be a spy who was sent to keep the group trapped, as he finds his attitude discouraging. Worth confesses to knowing that there’s no escape from the cube as he was the architect who designed the outer shell of the structure.
With a dimension of 434 feet, 26 rooms on each side, the structure contains a total of 17,576 rooms. The rooms not only comprise booby-traps like crosswire racks, acids, sound-activated weapons, and other death traps; they also seem to be moving from time to time. Worth had no idea about who he built the structure for and was only involved in the construction of the outer shell. The builders not only kept the right hand away from the left hand to keep them from knowing what they were up to but also captured innocent people in the cube to show the structure being utilized.
Worth suggests that the construction of the Cube initially had a purpose, but its intended purpose was long forgotten. Leaven realizes that the numbers are Cartesian coordinates that represent the position of the rooms within the cube. They proceed to the capacity at the edge and once again resort to using their boots to detect the trapped rooms. When they come across a room with a sound-activated trap, Quentin proposes to leave Kazan behind. Quentin and Holloway get into a heated argument where he accuses her of being menopausal and interfering and she accuses him of being a pedophile. Hours without food and water supply and no way to track time inside the confined space took a toll on them. They began turning against each other.
Quentin starts to display more tendencies of a villain than the hero he was pretending to be. The only ones making meaningful contributions towards the escape seem to be Leaven and Worth, while Quentin just bosses everyone around. They reach one of the side edges of the cube and discover a gap between the door and the outer shell. They tie up their clothes to make a rope and Holloway volunteers swing and investigate how to get around. While Holloway was hanging outside the room, Quentin catches her but lets her fall to her death, with a smile on his face. Others suspect Quentin’s actions but he tells the group that she slipped and fell.
While the group rests before heading to the bottom of the edge, Quentin makes advances towards Leaven and tries to convince her to abandon the others and leave with him. Leaven’s disinterest infuriates him and he becomes hot-tempered. The ruckus wakes up Worth and Kazan and they rush to save Leaven. Quentin and Worth get into an altercation where Quentin throws Worth into another room.
Hearing Worth laugh hysterically intrigues the rest. Upon finding the corpse of Rennes, they realize they were back to where they started from. Worth notices that the room adjacent to where Rennes died has changed and he and Leaven discover that the rooms have been moving. Leaven also realizes that the trapped doors can be identified by the larger set of prime powers and not prime numbers as she had previously assumed. But the calculations seem too large for Leaven to solve without a computer; it is then that the group realizes that Kazan is a genius and basically a human-computer. The group makes their way to the exit with Kazan’s help.
Worth traps Quentin behind a door and they proceed without him. While he catches up to them, Worth throws him inside another room and assumes he’s dead. They finally reach the bridge room and open the door to see bright light after a long time. While Leaven and Worth discuss the world they were about to return to, Quentin appears from behind and impales Leaven. Worth holds him back while letting Kazan escape. They never find out who was behind the cube and why they were put in. With Kazan being the only survivor, there’s a chance that their stories will never be taken seriously.
Cube 2: Hypercube (2002)
An Izon employee, Becky, seems to be trapped in one of the cubes. She has flashbacks from when she used to work in the labs. She examines her surroundings and enters another room where she is pulled upside down, probably by reverse gravity. While the title credits roll, several people are seen asleep in beds covered in some sort of wrap. A man, probably an executive, is seen shouting for help from one of the rules and asking interns to help him. He is carrying an empty briefcase and a set of handcuffs. In another room, Kate is seen exploring the cube. After entering the next chamber, she runs into Simon who mistakes her for a spy and attacks her.
Another person appears to be peeking from a different room while he is threatening her. The third person disappears, only to reappear from different walls and vanish once again. Kate goes to examine the other room, leaving Simon behind. There she meets Sasha, a blind girl, who’s scared and curled up in the corner. Jerry enters the room and introduces himself. He has been numbering the rooms he has been to and later reveals himself to be one of the engineers involved in constructing the rooms. He has no clue about the identity of the client though.
They enter another room where they find the man before trying to take his own life. Max appears and helps take off the belt around the man’s neck. They learn that the man is Colonel Thomas Maguire, who hints that they need to solve a code to escape the structure. Mrs. Paley enters and greets everyone in the room and seems to be a little amnesiac and delusional.
Sasha hears something dangerous approaching and warns everyone to escape immediately. An invisible wave appears in the room. The rest of the group escapes while Kate stays behind to help the Colonel. Realizing that the Colonel doesn’t want to be saved and seeing the invisible wave approach faster she barely escapes to the other room. The invisible wave eats into the Colonel and his belongings. They understand that gravity operates in different directions in each room. Mrs. Paley and Jerry discover that they are trapped in a tesseract or a hypercube. Kate notices the number 60659 appearing wherever they go. The group discovers Izon.
Additionally, the weapons industry is connected to them. Mrs. Paley opens a panel where she and Simon appear to be killed in an alternate dimension. They debate whether they are stuck in an alternate universe or an optical illusion. While the group rests, Simon remembers that he is in the cube to look for Becky, the missing Izon employee. Sasha’s sensitive hearing warns the group of danger approaching. A floating square appears in the middle of the room which grows into several shifting variations of a tesseract and expands into a lethal and rapidly spinning frame.
The group escapes to a different capacity but Jerry gets caught and dies being pulled into the tesseract, where the blades shred him down to atomic level. Simon begins to doubt Mrs. Paley to be a spy and unintentionally causes her death. This turns the remaining members against him and they leave him behind. Max and Julia enter a room where time flows faster and they begin to age. The hunger drives Simon insane and he ends up killing the parallel versions of Jerry and Becky on encountering them.
Kate witnesses grisly alternate realities in other rooms. Sasha presents the theory that time and space are distorted in their location and the tesseract is going to implode, and reality is about to collapse. She reveals her true identity to be Alex Truck, the computer hacker who has built the tesseract. When she realized how Izon intended to utilize her work, she tried to prevent the operation. While being chased, she decided to hide in the one place where no one would look. Alex believes all of them are dead while Kate is optimistic about finding a way out. After realizing that the tesseract will implode at 6:06:59 she jumps into a black void. She wakes up in an unknown factory surrounded by Izon authorities. They shoot her dead and report Phase 2 as terminated.
Hypercube had a different writer and director than the first movie and a higher budget. While the culprits and purpose of the cube remained a mystery in the first part, the sequel tries to explain the creators of the cube. The original cube was a mechanical construct whereas the hypercube was a quantum experiment for teleportation. The film reveals that the captives were drugged and abducted from different parts of the world. They were selected based on their collective ability to solve the puzzle on how to get out. Most of them were involved in several stages of the construction of the hypercube but none of them had the full picture.
Some were well versed in theories of realities while others were involved in the architectural and engineering aspects. The Cube was a project by a weapons company, Izon, and at some point, the government took over. The booby-trapped rooms from Cube were replaced by complex quantum-based tesseract in Hypercube. A motion-based configuration shape often appeared to shred its victims or simply erode them. The captives had to face the dangers of time warp when they entered the room where time flows at a faster speed.
In the hypercube, the captives either aged faster or found themselves in an alternate reality. The original ending for the sequel left a lot of questions unanswered but the alternate ending resolved some of those queries. The alternate ending suggests that Izon has been operative for testing and most didn’t survive. They also terminated the captives even if they manage to survive. Alex Truck had designed the time-based puzzle for Izon, thinking she was creating it for a video game. The alternate ending reveals that Kate was inside the cube for only 6 minutes and 59 seconds as time flows at a different speed inside the cube.
Cube Zero (2004)
Cube Zero starts with Ryjkin looking for a way out of the cube. He opens one of the doors to enter another room. There he gets sprayed on with a liquid which he mistakes for water. Seconds later, the liquid begins to melt his skin and peel his body. Eric watches the feed from the observation room while he sketches a picture of his co-worker Dodd. He checks Ryjkin’s file and consent form, and Dodd reminds him that the authorities don’t encourage examining the files of the captives. Eric defeats Dodd in a game of chess without even looking at the board, hinting that he’s a genius. When Eric asks questions about their missing colleagues, Dodd shuts him down.
They receive their lunches in the form of a tablet and an instruction to record the dream of a new captive named Cassandra Rains. She was taken away while walking in the forest with her daughter. Someone from the army with a tattoo on his forehead had shot her down with a sedative. The next thing she remembered was lying on an operating table with her daughter in the next bed. Eric and Dodd were under the impression that all the captives were recipients of death sentences with the option of choosing death or going into the cube with their memories erased. All of them had to sign a consent form before they were put into the cube.
Rains find other people in one of the rooms and mistakes one of them as the enemy, seeing the same tattoo on his forehead as her captor. She learns that everyone in there has lost their memories and has no recollection of their past lives or who they were. They show her the boot system to detect booby traps, but one of them ends up getting cut into pieces by a wire, despite checking the room with his boot. Rains theorize that there must be other kinds of sensors in the rooms which detect body temperature.
She also notices random letters engraved near the doors and assumes that they were for mapping. Eric develops a liking towards Rains while observing her and starts making numerous sketches of her. He discovers that there is no consent form in Cassandra’s file and intends to report the mistake upstairs. Just as Eric is about to make the call, they receive instructions to perform the exit procedure for a captive who has reached one of the exits. The captive turns out to be one of their colleagues, Owen. He’s asked if he remembers his name, to which he responds correctly. When asked whether he believes in God, he answers no.
Once Eric presses the no button, his colleague gets incinerated. On comprehending the cruel nature of the Cube and how the people upstairs were sending innocent people into the Cube, Eric takes it upon himself to fix the situation. He distracts his colleague and takes the elevator down to the entrance of the Cube. One of the supervisors responsible for monitoring the employees arrives from upstairs, to prevent Eric from helping Cassandra escape. Dodd helps Eric and Cassandra reach the exit room and sabotages the control panel servicing the cube. It gives Cassandra and Eric only 10 minutes before the cube resets and vaporizes everything inside.
They reach the exit room but Haskell awaits to catch them. Yet, they escape using a secret auxiliary exit to a forest where soldiers have been deployed to catch them. Eric passes out after being shot by a dart but Cassandra manages to escape. Eric then finds himself in a surgery room where Jax informs him that Cassandra had escaped but Eric was found guilty of high treason and sabotage against his country and God. He is shown a consent form for going into the cube which he doesn’t remember signing.
Jax also tells him that his sentence has been extended for two more lifetimes and he has been convicted in a trial. His brain is surgically altered against his will; he is lobotomized and put in the cube. He becomes mentally handicapped and repeatedly mentions the color of his room. His behavior resembles that of Kazan from the first movie until he gets found by other captives, who are curious about how Eric had survived.
The director states that Eric’s story is similar to Kazan’s. He hints that Kazan was a technician like Eric and his behavior was modified after going through the same procedure. Cube Zero serves as the prequel to Cube. The organization drugs and captures people across the world and makes them sign a consent form while they are under the influence of the drugs. The original intention behind the cube seemed to be for punishing death row inmates and the organization doesn’t intend to let anyone exit the cube alive.
The organization not only keeps a file for each captive but also observes and records them via hidden cameras. They capture anyone who poses a political threat, and those who have been involved with the construction or operations of the cube. It includes contractors and ex-employees. The employees are never given the full picture or encouraged to know more than they should. The cube has been operating and being beta tested for quite some time. The organization controls the minds of their soldiers with a device that makes their eyes look green.
The employees who know too much are lobotomized and put in the cube. Cube Zero has a similar setting to that of the first film. Just like the original version, the captives need to solve a puzzle to avoid death traps and escape. Ending up in a room with the traps could melt their skin and bones or slice them into little pieces. All three of the Cube films have a different setting as all of them are written and directed by different people. Cube Zero resolves some of the queries set by its predecessors but leaves enough unanswered to keep you hooked to the franchise.
Future of the Franchise
So, what’s in store for the future of the franchise after getting a sequel and a prequel? Japan is set to release their remake of Cube this Halloween. From the trailer, it seems to perfectly capture the tension and conflict of the first film. The remake will follow a group of six people who wake up inside the confines of a metallic structure of small cubic rooms. But not all of them will survive as some of the rooms are booby-trapped. We can see the group using the classic boot method to detect snares and use mathematical calculations to figure out a way to exit the cube.
They also need to figure out why they were chosen of all people to be held captive in the puzzle prison. Rumors about the remake started circulating around 2015 but Lionsgate hadn’t moved forward with the project back then. This Halloween, we can finally look forward to the release of Cube’s Japanese remake, with or without subtitles!