More Ideas, Less Enjoyable

The first Cube film is a fantastic little movie. A low-budget Canadian horror playing in the realm of slasher flicks, it provides taut, tense terror alongside a really interesting setup. When I saw it back in 1997 (on video at Blockbuster) I was hooked by its story and its concept. When I heard a sequel was coming out, I was stoked. I actually picked up a book on mathematics and multidimensional geometry just so I could understand the concepts at play in the sequel, titled Cube 2: Hypercube because it was set in a four-dimensional cube prison (and, spoiler, I never made it very far into that book). I was so excited.

And then the sequel came out and I was completely let down. Cube is a movie that uses its concept – people trapped in a series of cubes which move around a larger cube and require complex math to understand the position of each cube across space and time – to tell a tight story about people. Cube 2: Hypercube has another really interesting concept, but its story about people falls very short. In fact, I’d say that the main story of the sequel is essentially the same as the previous film: a bunch of people end up in a cube, have to find their way, and slowly go mad before killing each other. Swap the cubes they’re trapped in and they feel interchangeable.

The reason for this is that the film feels like it has to spend a lot more time on its concept, delving into the math and science and supposition of the hypercube. It gets so wrapped up in itself, in fact, that it even begins to belabor its own points, stretching out a threadbare story so it can talk more and more about the potential possibilities of the hypercube. At a certain point while watching the film I just wished all the characters would shut up so we could stop talking about the concept and make with the murder. This is supposed to be a horror movie and yet I was utterly bored with everything.

Kate (Kari Matchett) awakes inside the cube, a brightly lit room with six doors on its various sides. She doesn’t seem to know how she got there, so she moves around, trying to get her bearings. She meets up with Simon (Geraint Wyn Davies), a man who says he’s a Private Detective looking for a missing woman. Their interaction starts off violently, with Simon pulling a knife, before they find a way to work together. It’s interesting that Simon was allowed to keep his knife when so many others were dropped into the cube in their street clothes with nothing else of value on them.

Over time they meet the others – Neil Crone as Jerry, an engineer; Matthew Ferguson as Max, a hacker; Lindsey Connell as Julia, a lawyer; Bruce Gray as Thomas, a colonel who knows too much; Barbara Gordon as Mrs. Paley, a retired theoretical mathematician; and Grace Lynn Kung as Sasha, a blind teenager – and start exploring the cube. It’s an odd prison, though, with rooms that seem to loop on themselves, hidden traps that emerge at odd times, and moments where gravity and time actually shift. This prison isn’t right, and if they can’t find a way to escape, they’ll all likely die within its rapidly shifting walls.

The first issue with Cube 2: Hypercube is that it doesn’t really have a new story to tell. The first film was about the people in the cube, trying to figure out what was going on and where they were. The villain was a government conspiracy, the operations of a maladjusted government just going on about their business. It’s told through the eyes of the prisoners and it’s all conjecture and supposition. And then we get to the sequel and it’s all more of the same. Government conspiracy, conjecture, told through the eyes of the prisoners. The film doesn’t have anything new to say about the situation so it retreads a lot of ground we’ve already seen before.

Some of this is a limitation of the way the films are told. You can only do so much with a bunch of people trapped in a seemingly endless series of rooms that all look the same. The first film got by on novelty but you can’t use that trick twice. When the second film plays the same games from the same angles, it feels tired, not interesting. The movie needed to find a new hook to actually get people interested in the characters and the story because, otherwise, what’s even the point of watching this at all?

That’s likely the reason why the writers got so caught up in the machinations and math and physics of the hypercube prison. When you don’t have a new story to tell you focus on the things that are new, and for viewers that’s the prison itself. While it looks similar to the first movie, a series of interconnected rooms that all look the same, the effects the hypercube could have – changes in dimensions, in gravity, in time itself – allowed for new puzzles and new traps… at least in theory. In practice, though, that really doesn’t pan out.

The first movie used CGI in places for the traps, where it was easier and cheaper to make deadly effects without needing to actually build practical solutions. Cube 2: Hypercube, though, goes well beyond that. Every trap uses CGI. Formless walls of transparent fog act as the function of all the traps, crushing and spiking and aging people unnaturally as they get caught in these weird… things. It doesn’t look as tactile or interesting as the first film. It all seems so fake and hacked in, like the characters are being killed by the whims of a CG artist and not the actual cube itself.

Beyond that, though, the film starts playing with the idea of multiple timelines and time loops, leading to some characters who have died before showing up again, and again. We’re told they’re different instances of the people, but they all act the same and seem the same, so all this does is rob their deaths of any relevance. Once the multiple timelines were revealed, whenever someone died I just thought, “eh, it’s fine. They’ll be back again.” And the times where someone stayed dead stood out because there was actually no reason for it at all. They could have come back, per the desires of the film, they just didn’t.

As such, the film also isn’t scary. People die for no reason, with no build up or tension, and then they come back with just as little reasoning seemingly behind it. Are we supposed to be scared of a guy getting beheaded by formless pillars of fog? Are we supposed to feel something when a different version of him is revealed to be just fine. The film robs itself of any scares or horror because it has robbed the very act of death of any kind of meaning. We can’t care about anything because it all seems so pointless.

In the end all that we really have is an obvious final girl wandering the same room over and over, without any tension behind it. The first film was tightly plotted and well executed, a proper little low-budget horror sensation. Cube 2: Hypercube is bigger, with more ideas and more characters, but it doesn’t do anything with any of it. It’s a sequel for the sake of a sequel, but without a real story, or anything interesting it can do, this more complex cube ends up feeling like less of a movie in the end.