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Cube is a 1997 Canadian independent science fiction horror film directed and co-written by Vincenzo Natali.[8] A product of the Canadian Film Centre's First Feature Project,[9] Nicole de Boer, Nicky Guadagni, David Hewlett, Andrew Miller, Julian Richings, Wayne Robson, and Maurice Dean Wint star as individuals trapped in a bizarre and deadly labyrinth of cube-shaped rooms.

Cube
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Vincenzo Natali
Written by	André Bijelic Graeme Manson Vincenzo Natali[1]
Produced by	Mehra Meh Betty Orr[1]
Starring	Nicole de Boer Nicky Guadagni David Hewlett Andrew Miller Julian Richings Wayne Robson Maurice Dean Wint
Cinematography	Derek Rogers[1]
Edited by	John Sanders[1]
Music by	Mark Korven[1]
Production company	Cube Libre[2]
Distributed by	Cineplex Odeon Films[3] Trimark Pictures
Release dates	9 September 1997 (1997-09-09) (Toronto International Film Festival) 11 September 1998 (1998-09-11) (United States)
Running time	90 minutes[4]
Country	Canada
Language	English
Budget	$350,000 CAD[5]
Box office	$8.9 million[6][7]

Cube gained notoriety and a cult following, for its surreal and Kafkaesque setting in industrial, cube-shaped rooms. It received generally positive reviews and led to a series of films. An American remake, currently on hold, is in development at Lionsgate,[10] and a Japanese remake was released in 2021.

Plot

In a pre-credits sequence, a man (Alderson) enters into a cube-shaped room all coloured in red, thinking the room is safe, he doesn't realise a metal wire mesh had swung right through him, dies in a gory manner as he is shown sliced up into pieces, as the bloodied mesh resets back to place.

Five desperate people – Quentin, Worth, Holloway, Leaven, and Rennes – meet in another identical room. None of them knows how or why they have arrived. Quentin, who had been exploring, warns everyone that some rooms contain traps. Rennes, an escape artist of seven prisons, assumes the traps are triggered by motion detectors. He tests each room by throwing one of his boots first. The maze is beset by frequent tremors. Leaven notices numbers inscribed into the narrow passageways between rooms. Rennes enters a room that he thinks to be safe and is killed by an acid spray trap. This indicates that each trap is triggered by different sensors.

Quentin believes each person was chosen to be there. He is a divorced police officer, Leaven is a young mathematics student, and Holloway is a free clinic doctor. Worth cagily describes himself as an office worker. Leaven hypothesizes that any room marked with a prime number is a trap, and they find an intellectually disabled man named Kazan, whom Holloway insists they bring along. Quentin injures his leg in a trapped room deemed safe by Leaven's calculations. Tensions rise over personal conflicts and the mystery over the maze's purpose. After being provoked by Quentin, Worth admits that he designed the maze's outer shell (also shaped like a cube) for a shadowy and uncaring bureaucracy. He guesses that its original purpose has been forgotten; they have been imprisoned within the maze simply to put it to use.

Worth's knowledge of the outer shell's dimensions allows Leaven to determine that each side of the Cube is 26 rooms across, making 17,576 rooms in total. She realizes that the numbers indicate the Cartesian coordinates of each room. The group moves toward the nearest edge as determined by her theory, but each of the rooms near the outer wall is trapped. Rather than backtrack, they travel silently through a room with a sound-activated trap. After Kazan makes a sound and nearly causes Quentin's death, Quentin threatens Kazan and clashes with Holloway, who defends Kazan and insinuates that Quentin may have been an abusive husband who likes young girls.

When the group reaches the edge, they find a bottomless abyss separating the maze from the outer shell. Holloway volunteers to scout the gap using a rope made out of the group's clothes. Holloway tries to swing towards the outer wall, but another tremor causes the group to lose grip of the rope. Quentin grabs Holloway, but drops her to her death.

Quentin has become more unhinged. He attempts to persuade Leaven to join him in abandoning the others and makes a sexual advance on her. She rejects him. Worth intervenes. Quentin beats him savagely and drops him into another room through a floor hatch. There, the group finds Rennes's corpse, indicating that they have wandered in circles. Worth realizes that the rooms move throughout the Cube, causing the tremors. Leaven deduces that traps are not tagged by prime numbers, but by powers of prime numbers. Kazan is revealed as an autistic savant[11] who can mentally calculate prime factorizations. With his help, Leaven guides the group to the bridge room that will lead them out of the maze. Worth ambushes and apparently kills Quentin, leaving him behind. Kazan opens the final hatch, revealing a bright white light, but Worth declines to leave the Cube as he has lost his will to live.

As Leaven tries to convince the guilt-stricken Worth to join her, Quentin reappears to stab and kill her with a hatch lever. He mortally wounds Worth while Kazan flees. As Quentin moves to kill Kazan, Worth pins Quentin in the narrow passageway as the rooms shift again. Quentin is torn apart by the machination. Worth crawls back to Leaven's corpse to die next to her.

Kazan wanders out into the bright light, his fate left unknown.

Cast

The cast is of Canadian actors who were relatively unknown in the United States at the time of the film's release.[12] Each character's name is connected with a real-world prison.

Name	Skill	Prison connection	Actor
Kazan	Intellectually disabled savant, as mental calculator	Kazan prison, Russia	Andrew Miller
David Worth	Unwitting designer of the Cube's outer shell	Leavenworth Prison, United States.	David Hewlett
Quentin McNeil	Police officer who aggressively takes charge	San Quentin State Prison, United States.	Maurice Dean Wint
Joan Leaven	A young mathematics student	Leavenworth Prison, United States.	Nicole de Boer
Dr. Helen Holloway	Free clinic doctor	Holloway Women's Prison, United Kingdom.	Nicky Guadagni
Rennes	Escape artist of seven prisons	Centre pénitentiaire de Rennes, France	Wayne Robson
Alderson	Unknown and alone	Alderson Federal Prison Camp, United States.	Julian Richings

On casting Maurice Dean Wint as Quentin, Natali's cost-centric approach sought an actor for a split-personality role of hero and villain. Wint was considered the standout among the cast and was confident that the film would be a breakthrough for the Canadian Film Centre.[13]

Development

Pre-production

An episode of the original Twilight Zone television series, "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" (first aired 22 December 1961), was reportedly an inspiration for the film.[14][15][16] Other inspiration was Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat, which was shot entirely in a lifeboat with no actor standing at any point.[17]

Director Vincenzo Natali did not have confidence in financing a film. He cost-reduced his pitch with a single set reused as many, with the actors moving around a virtual maze.[18] As the most expensive element, a set with a cube and a half was built off the floor, to allow the surroundings to be lit from behind all walls of the cube.[19] In 1990, Natali had had the idea to make a film "set entirely in hell", but in 1994 while working as a storyboard artist's assistant at Canada's Nelvana animation studio, he completed the first script for Cube. The initial draft had a more comedic tone, surreal images, a cannibal, edible moss growing on the walls, and a monster that roamed the Cube. Roommate and childhood filmmaking partner Andre Bijelic helped Natali strip the central idea to its essence of people avoiding deadly traps in a maze. Scenes outside the cube were deleted, and the identity of the victims changed. In some drafts, they were accountants and in others criminals, with the implication that their banishment to the Cube was part of a penal sentence. One of the most important dramatic changes was the removal of food and water for a more urgent escape.[20]

After writing Cube, Natali developed the short film, Elevated. It is set in an elevator to show investors how Cube would hypothetically look and feel. Cinematographer Derek Rogers developed strategies for shooting in the tightly confined elevator, which he later reused on a Toronto soundstage for Cube.[21]

Casting started with Natali's friends, and budget limitations allowed for only one day of script reading prior to shooting. As it was filmed relatively quickly with well prepared actors, there are no known outtake clips.[19]

Filming

The film was shot in Toronto, Ontario[22] in 21 days,[18] with 50% of the budget as C$350,000[12] to C$375,000 in cash[19] and the other 50% as donated services, for a total of C$700,000.[23] Natali considered the cash figure to be deceptive, because they deferred payment on goods and services, and got the special effects at no cost.[24]

The set's warehouse was near a train line, and its noise was incorporated into the film as that of the cubes moving.[25] To change the look of each room, some scenes were shot with wide lens, and others are long lens and lit with different colors, for the illusion of traversing a maze.[17] Nicole de Boer said that the white room was more comforting to actors at the start of a day's filming, compared to the red room which induced psychological effects on the cast during several hours in the confined space.[26]

The Cube was conceived by mathematician David W. Pravica, who was the math consultant.[27] It consists of an outer cubical shell or sarcophagus, and the inner cube rooms. Each side of the outer shell is 434 feet (132 m) long. The inner cube consists of 26³ = 17,576 cubical rooms (minus an unknown number of rooms to allow for movement), each having a side length of 15.5 feet (4.7 m). A space of 15.5 feet (4.7 m) is between the inner cube and the outer shell. Each room is labelled with three identification numbers such as "517 478 565". These numbers encode the starting coordinates of the room and the X, Y, and Z coordinates are the sums of the digits of the first, second, and third number, respectively. The numbers also determine the movement of the room. The subsequent positions are obtained by cyclically subtracting the digits from one another, and the resulting numbers are then successively added to the starting numbers.[28]

Only one cube set was actually built, with each of its sides measuring 14 feet (4.3 m) in length, with only one working door that could actually support the weight of the actors. The colour of the room was changed by sliding panels.[29] This time-consuming procedure determined that the film was not shot in sequence, and all shots taking place in rooms of a specific color were shot separately. Six colors of rooms were intended to match the recurring theme of six throughout the film; five sets of gel panels, plus pure white. However, the budget did not stretch to the sixth gel panel, and so the film has only five room colors. Another partial cube was made for shots requiring the point of view of standing in one room and looking into another.[30]

The small set created technical problems for hosting a 30-person crew and a 6-person cast, becoming "a weird fusion between sci-fi and the guerrilla-style approach to filmmaking".[31]

Post-production

During post production, Natali spent months "on the aural environment", including appropriate sound effects of each room, so the Cube feels like a haunted house.[24]

Release

Cube was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival on 9 September 1997[1] and released in Ottawa and Montreal on 18 September.[1] A theatrical release occurred in Spain in early 1999,[23] while in Italy a release was scheduled for July 1999[32] and an opening in Germany was set for later that year.[19] In the Japanese market, it became the top video rental at the time,[33] and exceeded expectations, with co-writer Graeme Manson suggesting people in Japan had a better understanding of living in boxes so resonated better with the Japanese audience, as they were likely "more receptive to the whole metaphor underlying the film".[23]

The film's television debut in the United States was on 24 July 1999 on the Sci-Fi channel.[31]

Reception

Box office

In its home country of Canada, the film was a commercial failure, lasting only a few days in Canadian theatres. French film distributor Samuel Hadida's company Metropolitan Filmexport saw potential in the film and spent $1.2 million in a marketing campaign, posting flyers in many cities and flying members of the cast over to France to meet moviegoers. At its peak, the film was shown at 220 French box offices and became among the most popular films in France of that time, collecting over $10 million in box office receipts.[32] It went on to be the second-highest grossing film in France that summer.[19]

Elsewhere internationally, the film grossed $501,818 in the United States,[7] and $8,479,845 in other territories, for a worldwide total of $8,981,663.[6]

Critical response

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Cube holds an approval rating of 64%, based on 39 reviews, and an average rating of 6.3/10. The website's consensus reads: "Cube sometimes struggles with where to take its intriguing premise, but gripping pace and an impressive intelligence make it hard to turn away".[34] On Metacritic, the film has a score 61 out of 100, based on 12 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[35]

Bob Graham of the San Francisco Chronicle was highly critical: "If writer-director Vincenzo Natali, storyboard artist for Keanu Reeves's Johnny Mnemonic, were as comfortable with dialogue and dramatizing characters as he is with images, this first feature of his might have worked better".[36] Nick Schager from Slant Magazine rated the film three out of five stars, noting that, its intriguing premise and initially chilling mood were undone by threadbare characterizations, and lack of a satisfying explanation for the cube's existence. He concluded the film "winds up going nowhere fast".[37]

Anita Gates of The New York Times was more positive, saying the story "proves surprisingly gripping, in the best Twilight Zone tradition. The ensemble cast does an outstanding job on the cinematic equivalent of a bare stage... Everyone has his or her own theory about who is behind this peculiar imprisonment... The weakness in Cube is the dialogue, which sometimes turns remarkably trite... The strength is the film's understated but real tension. Vincenzo Natali, the film's fledgling director and co-writer, has delivered an allegory, too, about futility, about the necessity and certain betrayal of trust, about human beings who do not for a second have the luxury of doing nothing".[8] Bloody Disgusting gave a positive review: "Shoddy acting and a semi-weak script can't hold this movie back. It's simply too good a premise and too well-directed to let minor hindrances derail its creepy premise".[38] Kim Newman from Empire Online gave the film 4/5 stars, writing: "Too many low-budget sci-fi films try for epic scope and fail; this one concentrates on making the best of what it's got and does it well".[39]

Accolades

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The film won the award for Best Canadian First Feature Film at the 1997 Toronto International Film Festival[18] and the Jury Award at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film.[40]

Series and remakes

After Cube achieved cult status, it was followed by a sequel, Cube 2: Hypercube, released in 2002,[41] and a prequel, Cube Zero, released in 2004.[42]

In April 2015, The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Lionsgate Films was planning to remake the film, titled Cubed, with Saman Kesh directing, Roy Lee and Jon Spaihts producing and a screenplay by Philip Gawthorne, based on Kesh’s original take.[43][44]

A Japanese remake, also called Cube, was released in October 2021.[45]

See also

• "The Library of Babel"
• Saw (2004 film)

References

External links

• Cube at AllMovie
• Cube at IMDb
• Cube at Metacritic
• Cube at Rotten Tomatoes
• Cube at the TCM Movie Database

На других языках

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[de] Cube (Film)

Cube (engl. für Würfel) ist ein kanadischer Science-Fiction-Horrorfilm von Regisseur Vincenzo Natali aus dem Jahr 1997. Der Film zog die Fortsetzung Cube 2: Hypercube (2002) und das Prequel Cube Zero (2004) nach sich.

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- [en] Cube (1997 film)

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[es] Cube

Cube (en Hispanoamérica El cubo) es una película canadiense de terror, suspense y ciencia ficción de 1997 dirigida por Vincenzo Natali. El guion fue coescrito por Natali junto a André Bijelic y Graeme Manson. La película obtuvo los premios de mejor película y mejor guion en la edición de 1998 del Festival de Cine de Sitges.

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[ru] Куб (фильм)

«Куб» (англ. Cube) — научно-фантастический психологический триллер 1997 года. Первый полнометражный фильм канадского режиссёра Винченцо Натали[8]. В центре сюжета — шесть человек, проснувшихся в лабиринте множества комнат, которые должны найти выход, прежде чем погибнут от голода, жажды или ловушек. Слоган киноленты — «Не ищи причину. Ищи путь наружу»[4]. Главные роли в фильме исполнили Николь де Бур, Морис Дин Уинт и Дэвид Хьюлетт.

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