Cube 2 - Hypercube (2002) 1/2
Director: Andrzej Sekula
Starring: Kari Matchett, Geraint Wyn Davies , Grace Lynn Kung, Matthew Ferguson

at the center of nothingness lies… Cube 2

The first Cube was an interesting indie horror flick that made the most of its claustrophobic setting and bizarre deathtraps (even if the ending deteriorated into typical slash-formula). Well, Cube 2 is a mere shadow of the original that fails on just about every level, especially the ones that worked in the first film.

There’s this cube, you see, made up of a seemingly infinite number of white rooms all similar in appearance. As in the first movie, a bunch of people wake up in it and have to figure out a way to escape the cube, while fighting each other, of course. The difference this time is that the cube is a “hypercube” - a tesseract of four spatial dimensions. The filmmakers, of course, take liberties with this theoretical structure and interpret it to mean “weird” and “strange”, as in: differing time-speed rooms, antigravity rooms, rooms with flying killer rotating blades, etc..

blind girl and annoying old lady … waiting to take their act on the road

A quick and dirty dissection of Cube 2 reveals it to be a virtual carbon copy of the original film, and everyone knows that a copy never has the same quality as the original. A deeper probing of Cube 2 reveals it to be… nothing else, really. What makes the sequel different, as far as I can tell, is that the acting has gotten worse, the dialogue has gotten worse, the characters have gotten worse, and the mathematics have gotten worse.

Cube 2 is so bad that it’s a wonder to behold. It features characters that are so annoying and unbelievable that one could never care about their fate. The hypercube is more interesting than they are, and trust me - the hypercube is not that interesting. That’s because the movie doesn’t derive its suspense from, say, the concept of a tesseract and its implications - instead, it is perfectly content to recreate the psycho killer (played by Maurice Dean Wint in the first film, Geraint Wyn Davies in this one) as a antagonist. How boring. By the end of the film, we learn that every character has a secret that ties them to the shadowy organization which created the cube, but the question that is never answered is - why keep any secrets to begin with? If I was stuck in a strange laboratory experiment, I would want to contribute and collaborate as much as possible to facilitate an escape. Wouldn’t you? Not these people. A psycho, a senile old lady, a blind girl, and a few other forgettable characters are all we have to root for, but trust me, you can’t. The only character left to root for is the cube.

late hours at the lab

The biggest disappointment of Cube 2 is its lazy writing. I didn’t really care for the low budget Primer, but at least it tried to develop its concepts. The writers don’t seem to care about showing us the possibilities of the hypercube as a mathematical model given physical form; he thinks that the name itself will wow us, that inserting the concept of parallel universes will fulfill the film’s “cool factor” quotient (admittedly, the scene of Davies’ character wearing badges from multiple killings of the same guy as trophies is amusing), that showing decaying corpses dancing around in an antigravity field will polish over the turd that is essentially a bunch of hateful characters bickering in white rooms. The strange numbers that appeared in the first Cube turned out to be variations on the prime number set ; the strange numbers appearing in the sequel refer to a clock time - that should give an insight into the intensity of thought put into this experiment. Where’s the administration building? I’m dropping this course. - Bill Gordon

shadowy man, shadowy government, military industrial complex, secret experiment, blah blah blah

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