31 Days of Halloween: The Mystery of Cube 1997
Cube has a mystery with no satisfying answer. The movie is about a group of strangers who wake up in a strange technological room, a “cube” within other cubes, making up one gigantic trap. Who built it? Why does it exist? Why are these people there? The movie focuses on building suspense, tension, and paranoia, instead of answering these questions. A combination of talent and perserance helps the characters survive for a while, but the group eventually breaks down and one of their own turns on them before they can all solve the mathematical mystery behind The Cube.
I really like this film. It’s simple. It has a great concept. It’s got all the things genre fans love, and the character interactions work pretty well. Immediately, they try to figure out why they’re there and what’s going on, eventually giving up because there’s no way to ever know. Some of them are definitely connected to the Cube, like David Worth, who was contracted to build the outer shell to the device they’re in. Worth himself doesn’t really have any useful information and says, “This may be hard for you to understand, but there is no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It, it’s a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan. Can you grasp that? Big Brother is not watching you.” This ridiculous statement feeds into the group’s frustration because it’s obviously not true. These people are all too perfectly selected to be random or here by chance, including the math savant, who helps them solve the mystery of the Cube. If any group of people were to make it out, it’d be these guys. Later sequels try to explain what the Cube is, but really don’t do a good job. Most of the fun is not knowing anyway.
The legacy of Cube 1997 is obvious to almost everybody. I’ve never anybody say this movie was a big inspiration although there are other “bigger” movies with similiar concepts, including Saw 2, which seems like the same movie to me. A group of people wake up in a house and try to survive the traps, until one of them eventually turns on the group and tries to take control. The character Xavier eventually tries to kill one of them, and throws Amanda into a pit of syringes. Yuck. It’s worth noting that Saw 2 doesn’t have the same sense of mystery that Cube does, because the characters figure out pretty quickly they’re in Jigsaw’s test. The point is derived just as quickly. Instead, Cube doesn’t have this central idea, and I’m not sure which approach works best. The group also dismisses the connections between them, same as Cube, and both movies devolve into a kill or be killed games.
Overall, I like this movie, and it doesn’t get enough credit for influencing other horror movies. The Cube franchise has tried to continue on by exploring different parts of the mystery and recent rumors have come out about an American version of the Japanese Cube remake from 2021. This Japanese movie has no answers to the mystery of The Cube either, and the most successful version of this movie deals with the characters, the traps, and leaves the mystery on the backburner. However, Saw 2 shows that it really doesn’t matter either way, but I think the mystery adds another layer of tension. Sequels to the original Cube don’t work as well and muddle the mystery because our expectations can really never be satisfied now that they’ve set up this huge mystery behind this amazing piece of technology.
While the Cube’s story never stated such (but heavily hinted at this), I believe that each of those people placed into the Cube trap were placed there because they either had direct involvement in the construction of the Cube or indirect contact with someone who did. It could even have been as tertiary as sitting in the same bar or restaurant with one of the piece designers or it could even be a wait person waiting on their table, a bus boy or even the restaurant’s chef. In other words, the owner(s) of the Cube seem to be following a similar chain-of-infection protocol used for viruses. The owners of the Cube appear to be doing two things at once: 1) Find out how effective the Cube structure is at doing its job and 2) eliminate anyone even remotely connected with the project.
Clearly, the Cube owners want to make sure the Cube structure is only known to the Cube owner(s) themselves and to no one else.
The problem with the Cube idea is that people must be inserted into the Cube in groups for the paranoia issue to become effective. If an individual person was placed into the Cube by themselves, the Cube might not be effective.
How the Cube itself was ultimately to be used after these people went inside and were “taken care of”, we never really got know because the people we get to see weren’t privy to that information. The secondary problem is getting in there to clean up the mess that’s left over… that is, unless the Cube was also built with a self-cleaning system, which was also never discussed.
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