Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

This movie presents a simple, stark situation: Several people awake to find themselves trapped in some sort of structure ("the cube"): a large array of small, cube-shaped rooms connected on all faces by mechanical hatches. In their efforts to escape the cube, they discover that moving about in this place is very dangerous.

As the movie unfolds and the characters attempt to understand their prison, the very human side of the characters emerges, for both the better and the worse. I like the fact that none of the performers are Hollywood "names" and that the movie avoids the sort of pointless over-explanation which plagues so many other thrillers.

Seven strangers are trapped in a deadly maze and must work together to escape. Each of the seven prisoners has a unique personality, background, and skill set; can they work together to solve the riddle of the cube and escape? I thought this was a very interesting idea for a film and is largely driven by character development among and interaction between the prisoners. In the end though, the characters are so unrealistic and uncompelling that there is little to hold your attention. The maze, or Cube, consists of a series of interconnected rooms. Each room contains six doors, one on each wall, one on the floor, and one on the ceiling. Some of the rooms contain deadly traps that the group must figure out how to avoid. They must also figure out how to exit the maze. The six persons trapped in the maze include a college math student, an autistic man, a policeman, a doctor, a fugitive from prison, and an architect. Initially the story is very compelling: why are they in the maze? who selected these individuals? who built the maze? how do they get out? A tense, claustrophobic atmosphere is created as we learn some initial details about the maze and about the prisoners. As the story develops though, the characters start arguing amongst themselves, ultimately fighting each other. The nature of the arguments is silly, and in the end I couldn't wait for the film to be over. Once they figure out how to escape, the film turns into more of an escape/evasion type of story as some try to leave the other(s) behind. The writers and producer took this film into a pit from which it couldn't recover. Some of the most enthusiastic reviews claim that this film is a microcosm of society or other such nonsense. Balderdash. The most enthusiastic reviews grossly overstate the quality of this film. This is strictly a watch once as a rental type of film, not bad, but could have been much better.