Cube (Universal) (1997)

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General		Extras
Category	Science Fiction	Main Menu Audio & Animation Theatrical Trailer Deleted Scenes-3, with 2 +/- commentary Storyboard Comparisons-2 Storyboards-1 Gallery-Set Design, Trap Design, Production Design Audio Commentary-Andre Bijelic (Director) et al
Rating
Year Of Production	1997
Running Time	86:37 (Case: 92)
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Vicenzo Natali
Studio Distributor	Feature Film Project Universal Pictures Home Video	Starring	Nicole de Boer Nicky Guadagni David Hewlett Andrew Miller Julian Richings Wayne Robson Maurice Dean Wint
Case	?
RPI	$36.95	Music	Mark Korven

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s) English Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.85:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	None	Smoking	No
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    The film starts with a closeup of a human eye with strange patterns in it. Then, the camera pans back to reveal a strange-looking bald man - Alderson (Julian Richings) - peering around him. He appears to be in a room the shape of a cube. Each side of the cube (including the floor and ceiling) contains a hatch that when opened, leads to a passageway to a similar, but not quite identical cube. The "walls" (sides of the cube) are fluorescent and decorated with strange patterns and each cube can be in one of six colours. It becomes apparent to us that Alderson is in some sort of maze constructed entirely of inter-connected room-sized (14' by 14' by 14') cubes.

    Alderson starts entering cube after cube when suddenly (in a gruesome but somewhat cool scene) a wire mesh slices him into cubes and bits of his head and hands fall down leaving a bloody pile on the floor and a wire mesh with a bloody stain the shape of a human body. The wire mesh then folds and disappears back into the walls leaving no trace of its existence.

    Then we are slowly introduced to six individuals (all from different backgrounds) waking up in different cubes:

• Maurice Dean Wint (Quentin)
• Nicole de Boer (Leaven)
• David Hewlett (Worth)
• Nicky Guadagni (Holloway)
• Wayne Robson (Rennes)
• Andrew Miller (Kazan)

    Along the way, the film's creative team have done a great job building up the suspense and keeping us guessing along with the characters: What is the purpose of the maze? Who built the maze? How does it work? How does one find their way out? How does one recognize and avoid the traps? Who are the characters and why were they chosen? Will the characters turn against each other?

    Although the film provides some partial answers to the above questions, one of the strengths of the script is that we are kept guessing until the very end and some of the big questions are deliberately left unanswered or are unanswerable (also a common theme in Lem's fiction).

    I also like the symbolism of numbers used throughout the film: 6 individuals, 6 sides, 6 colours, three 3-digit numbers, etc.

    Warning: the trailer included on the disc contains at least one spoiler revealing an interesting property of the maze. If you have not seen this film before, I would recommend that you watch the film first prior to watching the trailer.

    The ending is somehow both surprising and predictable. All in all, I quite enjoyed the film, even though I personally found it quite disturbing and had problems sleeping the night I watched it.

    One thing that did annoy me in the film was the mathematics. Solving the maze requires, amongst other things, the ability to determine whether a given three digit number is prime or not. Although this is not exactly trivial, it's not as challenging as suggested in the script. For a start - any even 3-digit number is obviously not prime, and any number ending with 5 is divisible by 5. So, without too much trouble, we should be able to eliminate at least 60% of all numbers encountered without even bothering to factor them - which is what Leaven was attempting to do. And factoring a three digit number even using the "brute force" approach only requires one to consider prime numbers up to 31 (the nearest integer to the square root of 999) which is quite doable (the worst case scenario requires one to do about ten division/modulus operations).

    That wasn't what annoyed me. What really annoyed me was that towards the end of the film (Chapter 20) Leaven suddenly realizes that she not only needs to consider whether any of the three digit numbers were prime, but also whether the numbers are the "power of a prime" - supposedly a much harder task since the calculations were "astronomical". Well, I'm not sure what she means by a "power of a prime." If we assume that "power" means an exponent greater than 1, then a power of a prime is by definition a non-prime. If we do include exponents of 1, then every non-prime number is by definition composed of factors that are powers of prime numbers. Therefore, technically every number contains the power of at least one prime (even if it is the number itself). So what exactly are we trying to say here?

    I think the writers were trying to allude to the RSA decryption algorithm, which requires factorization of extremely large numbers but we are only dealing with three digit numbers here. What the characters appeared to be attempting to do was to count the number of factors in each number. This is not much more difficult than determining whether the numbers are prime or not in the first place. Doh!

    Trivia: All of the characters are named after prisons: Quentin (San Quentin, California), Holloway (England), Kazan (Russia), Rennes (France), Alderson (Alderson, West Virginia), Leaven and Worth (Leavenworth, Kansas). There are also other prison references in the film - for example, all the characters wear identical clothes which are reminiscent of prison outfits.

Video

    Although we do get to see a lot of saturated colours in this transfer, overall I would not rate colour accuracy very highly due to the over-exposed nature of most of the shots. It must have been quite difficult to do the colour processing for this film due to the brightly-lit walls of the cubes and the use of coloured lighting.

    The film source appears to be reasonably clean, and the transfer is free of MPEG artefacts (as far as I can tell). I think little or no post processing or clean-up has been applied to the telecine transfer, which is a shame as the film would look more visually appealing if accompanied by a sharp and clean transfer.

    There are no subtitle tracks present, and the disc has only a single layer as the film is relatively short (86:37 minutes).

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    Dialogue was reasonably clear, except occasionally the actors would mumble a line. I would have thought that there would have been a lot more "echo" present in the dialogue as those cube walls look like they would bounce sound all over the place, so clearly the dialogue must be ADR-processed.

    The music is non-melodic and sounds vaguely avant-garde or electronic and suited the film very well.

    The soundtrack of the film is originally mastered in "Ultra Stereo", which I presume is some sort of matrix surround encoding process similar to Dolby Stereo, and I am not sure if there has been any processing done on the audio track to convert from Ultra Stereo to Dolby Stereo. The resultant soundfield generated by the Dolby Pro Logic decoder was quite impressive. The rear surround speakers were consistently and continually engaged for ambience, which mainly consists of various industrial type metallic noises.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Main Menu Audio & Animation

Directors Commentary - André Bijelic et al

    The various participants of the commentary obviously know each other really well, and we get the feeling we're eavesdropping into a college dorm conversation between buddies as they talk about their "project."

    The commentary is actually quite good, and talks about how some of the special effects were done, and how the story evolved. It also reveals that the entire film was shot on one set - a single cube with one working passageway and three partially working doors that was shot over and over again using different panelling. They also mentioned problems getting the set to work (they had to change the door design halfway through the film) and that the shooting was done over 20 days.

Theatrical Trailer (1:46)

Deleted Scenes-3, with 2 +/- commentary

1. Missing Room: (1:30) the group comes upon a "missing room", with no trap and no doors leading out
2. Perspective: (0:38) Kazan looks at his thumb with one eye at a time
3. Overhead Shot: (0:35) a slightly different playout of the scene where Leaven and Quentin discuss the numbers in a cube shaft

Storyboards-3, 2 with live action comparison

1. Mesh Trap
2. Spike Trap
3. Wire Twist Trap

Gallery-Set Design, Trap Design, Production Design

• Set design
• Trap Design
• Production Design

    The video quality is rather soft and lacks 16x9 enhancement.

    The audio quality is above average for a "stereo" track, particularly in the use of rear surround speakers.

    The extras are very satisfactory, and appear to be substantially the same as the Region 1 version of this disc.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall