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 | | Ladies and gentlemen - our lead character. Isn't he dreamy? |
Most movie sequels often adopt the matra "More is better" and procede to fill up the frame with more sex, explosions, sex with explosions, and filler material. Video games have a similar matra: "Shove ten times more abilities into the playable character than in the original" Then the producers end up giving your character the ability to shoot in 8 directions at once, carry 100 guns instead of 50 and the capacity to spontaneously explode. Oddly enough, the film Cube²: Hypercube seems to follow in the steps of gaming instead of cinema - giving the lead character more power while rehashing the same story as the first.
For those unfamiliar with Cube, it was a no-budget Canadian SciFi thriller that had more in common with Closetland than Enemy of the State - the equivalent of The Real World if Croenenburg had his way. Seven strangers, thrust into a series of rooms filled with nightmarish killing devices with apparently no way out. No one knows where they are, or why they're even there and we watch as they try to find method to this madness. Cube is the quintesstial off-beat film: quirky, enigmatic, genre-crossing, surprisingly enjoyable in the right company and you can mock your friends for never having seen it before.
 | | Seven characters in search of a director. |
Cube² starts off with a drastically different looking cube - gone are the primary colors we oh so loved, those that which broke up the monotony of seeing our characters running from room to room. Now the interiors look a Steve Jobs revision after he's been up all night staring at his reflection in an iPod - sleek, white and smooth to the touch. In addition, the Cube is bigger and badder, with more weapons and flexibility at it's disposal. Rooms aren't booby trapped like in the first, but there is a murderous undefined "thing" that roams from room to room. A finely honed killing machine? Not especially. All it seems to be able to do is a) create slow moving icicles that eventually kill anyone left in the room, b) manifest itself into a giant geometrical structure that will devor you alive or c) appear as a shimmering wall of vapor that will slowly eat anything in its way. Why didn't they just have the cube project a giant-sized version of Janet Reno instead? Oh, and did I mention that the new cube has a new dimension to it? The dimension of time. Three dimensions wasn't enough - now it's a practically improbable physical being. Cube² goes to great lengths to try to explain why, but the end result is more shock for your buck.
 | | An exclusive look at Cube³: HyperMime. |
And that perhaps is Cube²'s fatal flaw: the Cube is now the center of the film. The original focused more on the Lord of the Flies interaction between the characters and used the "mathematical hints" in some rooms to help move along the narrative and increase tension. Well, consider it gone - it'd just muddy your mind anyway. In fact, Cube² feels more like an American remake. You know, like Point of No Return, Vanilla Sky or Three Men and a Baby - watered down, bland and asks nothing from the viewer. The math is gone, the characters fit all of the archetypes of the original version and the initial intrigue left by having no resolution to the creation of the Cube is ..no longer intriguing. In fact, they go as far to actually try to explain the existance of the new Cube, from the conception to the execution using plot devices that even the X-Files wouldn't have touched in their more desperate moments.
If you are a sadist and love burning ants or setting your Sim characters on fire, you might enjoy watching the characters squirm while seeing the many "alternate reality" versions of themselves being killed. Otherwise there is very little to recommend watching this over say, Explorers for the fiftith time. Rent the original again instead and hope to hell that they don't make Cube: The TV Series.
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