Since I’ve set a pretty standard precedent of using Thursday posts for general ponderings, it might seem strange that I’m filling this slot with a movie review. It might seem even stranger that I decided to review Cube, a low-budget 1997 Canadian horror film that was met with poor ticket sales and mixed reception. And yeah, I don’t think anyone would make the argument that Cube is a visual masterpiece. I sure won’t. But it is something distinct from any other movie I’ve ever seen and, when even great stories seem to blend together, something that really stands out is worth talking about. Also, I’m running low on ideas*.
If things get a little messy in this movie as it goes on, you have to admit that the filmmakers have laser-focused accuracy for at least the first scene. It reveals none of the important questions, but tells you everything you need to know for just about the entire movie. People wake up in a harshly-lit, perfectly cubic room. Each wall, the floor, and the ceiling all have little hatches that lead to nearly identical cube-like rooms. Some rooms are safe, and some have traps that kill the people that enter in gruesome and bizarre ways. Aside from a little math and a lot of characterization, that’s all you’ll really learn about the world of the movie, and you have to respect a story that takes a premise you can explain in under a hundred words and spins ninety minutes of drama out of it. The sheer surreality of the premise might at first make it hard to empathize with the characters. If you’ve never been trapped in a life-or-death escape from a gigantic box maze (and I’d guess most people haven’t), it would be hard to link up your own experience with the characters’ struggles. But, strange as it is, there isn’t much to the premise either, so even if you can’t relate at first, you can understand quickly, and that makes it easier to reflect your own feelings of paranoia, claustrophobia, and fear onto the characters.
Maybe it’s not right to praise the constraints, because a lot of them seem like cost saving measures. It’s pretty obvious that each room is just the exact same set, reused over and over. The tiny cast seems like an artistic choice to give intimate focus on a small number of characters, but odds are that narrowing the number of paid actors down to seven was more a way to cut expenses than anything else. But having such limited resources is probably the best thing this movie could have done. So often when, storytellers are given an infinite canvas with an empty page or a blank check from a studio, the endless possibilities get scary and the writer ends up sticking to what they’ve seen before. That’s not an option when you’ve got to shoot the whole movie in a fifteen-by-fifteen foot room and, for these filmmakers at least, being starved for space to grow the story led to some real creativity.
I realize I’ve gotten pretty deep into this review and have hardly said a word about the writing, characters, plot, and themes, which is odd because usually those are the only things I usually care about. That’s because they were ultimately disappointing, especially the characters. Two in particular seemed like they would be really fascinating at about the halfway mark, but then fell back into simpler characterizations when the writers got antsy to wrap things up. Quentin, the leader of the people trapped in the cube, at first seems like an interesting commentary on how strong personalities can be both necessary and abusive in life-or-death situations, but right when the ambiguity seemed to reach its fever pitch, things get a whole lot more exciting but a whole lot less interesting. It’s rare enough to see people with disabilities in movies, and at first it seems like do it right when they introduced Kazan, a man with severe developmental disabilities, as one of the Cube-dwellers. He repeatedly frustrates the group’s escape attempts, which put them in the awkward position of not wanting to leave him but not having a use for him. I thought the story was getting at a really important and rarely told theme, that all human beings have innate value and are worth saving, no matter what they can or can’t do. But, to avoid going to heavy on the spoilers, all I'll say is that the filmmakers bail out on this potentially interesting idea too.
So, judging from the fact that most of my praise for this movie is in all the things it was unable to do with its limited resources, I think it’s fair to say that this is not a movie that will live on as one of the high water-marks for cinema. And that’s okay, not every movie has to be, or even can be. But it’s also something you see very rarely in movies: a singular vision, never muddled up by studio demands or test screenings. It might not be great, but it’s about all I can hope for in my own writing: something constrained and flawed and honestly kind of stupid, but something that no one has ever seen before and something everyone will remember.
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* Also, I’m scared that Thursday posts are getting a little too formulaic and I don’t want my writing to ever get predictable. So expect more stuff like this.
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