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Nice
poster, at least
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In the original Cube a group of people
from disparate backgrounds wake up in a prison
built from seemingly endless cube-shaped rooms
joined on all sides by maddeningly similar rooms.
Without any knowledge of how they got there, the
group has to figure out what the prison is and
how to get out. Eventually, they discover that
the prison is a mathematical problem and that
there is a way out.
Cube
may have been one of the great student films.
It was a project by the Canadian Film Center,
a sort of graduate center for film professionals
to hone their skills, each year producing a feature
film project. Cube was a clever production,
utilizing basically one cube room set and, when
it was good, making the action take place in the
mind. When it was bad, Cube had amateurish
dialogue, contrived characters shouting at each
other, and lack of ambition. When it was good,
Cube was an interesting intellectual
puzzle and a victory for doing a lot with very
little resources.
Cube
2: Hypercube
takes everything that was bad about Cube
and made it manifestly worse without expanding
upon the interesting concept. Like the original,
Hypercube has assembled a cast of familiar
Canadian TV actors and given them clunky dialogue
and dull dull characters. For a film that advertises
itself as a multidimensional problem, Hypercube's
glaring problem is the one-dimensionality of its
characters. No more than ten minutes into the
movie all the characters are in the same room,
shouting declarative statements and unfunny lines
that embarass more than they zing. Whereas the
original at least took some time to reveal how
cardboard the characters were, the sequel cuts
to the chase and throws out all hope of development.
Bad
acting may be the fault of the director Andrzej
Sekula (director of photography of American
Psycho), but the writers are the main goats
for not following up on the positive qualities
of Cube. In the original, at least when
the conflicts between the prisoners became stale,
the story moved along as the characters concentrated
on the problem of finding a way out of the maze.
In Hypercube, the problem is essentially
unsolveable and abandoned by the plot early on.
The 'hypercube' maze these characters are in is
one of those cliched environments where all realities
are real and writing doesn't have to make sense.
Here it seems more of an excuse for interesting
post-production effects (which are really not
all that, either).
Cube's
story was also made intriguing by how little it
revealed, using the practised cult tactic of letting
the fan-base spin out their own theories for a
backstory. Who built the cube? Why are the people
in the prison? The original was clever enough
to only hint at the reasons. Hypercube,
by comparison, has characters throwing out backstory
in every stilted line, trying to move the plot
along by explaining rather than doing. Also as
a result, the viewer realizes how paper thin and
cliched the backstory is.
In
any film of this quality you might think that
the saving grace would be in action, gore or effects.
You might think that, wouldn't you? Not here.
Coming
soon on DVD
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Those
who know me know that I'm very easily untracked so that
I can follow a whim. Yesterday Kelvin found a quality
DVD of Zhang Yimou's "Hero" which is now an
excuse for a DVD party. Anyone who is in Vancouver this
Sunday please feel free to show up. By untracked I mean
that I spent a few hours cutting my own trailer
from the material on the DVD and making up this party
invite. This process was complicated by my having to
learn how to rip a DVD and make it an AVI. After that
I had to do a lot of After Effects. 
This
week I've pledged to finish editing, Flash animating
Fidgital's 
