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Cube
Sci-Fi Thriller / Japanese / 2021
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
In my perusal of IMDb I discovered that there was a remake of Cube. I'm sure somebody considers that blasphemy, but I am 100% game for a remake of Cube, I think there are a lot of ways it could have been improved, namely by deepening the investigative process of the characters and cutting back on the gore a bit, though being that this is a Japanese remake, I'm not too confident about that.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
We are not spared gore in this version of the story, unsurprisingly, though thankfully it's about as graphic as the original and not moreso.
To quickly summarize the original Cube: Multiple characters wake up in a series of cubic rooms all connected by doors on every face. Each room looks identical save for the lighting, however some rooms are trapped and those rooms are identifiable by the prime numbers found in the coordinates inside each door. The characters begin by "booting" each room, throwing boots into rooms to trip any possible traps before eventually discovering the traps can be noise sensitive too.
While the relationships between the mutual strangers becomes worse and worse, one of them is found to be an autistic savant who can calculate 3-digit prime numbers in his head and this is used to determine the first room of the building and find the exit. As tensions heighten and people kill each other, only the Savant makes it out alive, or so we guess. We never see outside the Cube, we never learn who made the Cube, why it exists, or why anyone was placed inside.
It's a big cliffhanger ending and as a high-concept psychological thriller, it works.
This is... similar, but different in some good ways and mostly some bad ways.
On the positives side, the characters are shown to be more resourceful with what they have, they not only use their boots to test for traps, but they use their shirts to make a rope ladder and even use the buttons on those shirts to write out equations on the surfaces in the rooms.
It's worth noting that given the mystery of the Cube, a remake has a lot of wiggle room to take creative liberties, though hopefully not so much as to totally expose everything about the Cube as the sequels did. One way in which the story is changed is the twist ending in which it is revealed that Main Girl is a robot of sorts who exists to secretly observe the other characters. I appreciate this twist especially because when we're shown her reintroduced into the Cube and happening upon another group she demonstrates an artificial series of blinks directed at every individual character, clearly registering each as a "player". If you restart the movie and watch her initial appearance again you can see that it's edited in a way that makes her appearance seem much more natural.
I think that's clever and I genuinely don't dislike the idea that one of the group is secretly an aspect of the Cube itself spying on them, like the cameras they assumed must exist.
What I don't like about it is while her behavior is eventually rationalized in this way, until that reveal, she just looks like a terribly written character. She doesn't emote, she's rarely the focus of anything that's happening, and when the characters are having an audible fight to the death in an adjacent room with an open door, she's just conveniently offscreen doing ****all.
It may be an unpopular opinion to take, but if your movie's plot is indistinguishable from shit writing, then your twist could use some work.
A couple more things I'll add is that the musical flavor is good, it's not all doom-and-gloom, but it's very synthy and moody, I like it. Also this movie seems to have more of a budget, so we get a greater opportunity to showcase some of the mechanisms of the Cube when the characters find the outside of it.
It's been a while since I've seen the original Cube, but I'm going to venture to say that about everything else was worse in this remake.
1.) There's some dumb lines like "who is Hiruto" after it's been established by honorifics that Hiruto is Main Guy's brother.
2.) The death of Psycho Guy looks retarded cause he's killed by some ludicrous telescoping metal tree thing that turns him into a scarecrow.
3.) When Psycho Guy tries to strangle Main Guy it looks like the laziest attempt to choke someone I've ever seen.
4.) Psycho Guy's heel-turn is stupid as shit because the rationalization is that he works at a convenience store and hates getting bullied by middle schoolers, so he wants to kill himself, but he can't kill himself for whatever reason therefor he wants to kill total strangers. WHAT.
5.) This movie inserts several lines needlessly making generational hatred a theme of the movie, where the Not-Austistic Savant Kid claims to "hate adults" while Grandpa says "I hate young people". This never amounts to anything whatsoever.
6.) Psycho Guy even says he "hates adults" and kills Grandpa then rejoins the group and says "children shouldn't get in the way of adults" to Not-Autistic Savant Kid. So you're an adult when it's convenient?
7.) Not-Autistic Savant Kid isn't autistic or a savant, he's just a kid who knows how to calculate prime numbers and he's not the only character that can do that. So instead of getting a genuine, but annoying, autistic character (who served as a danger to the group and therefor a moral dilemma), we get an amateur child actor.
8.) Grandpa's a constant ******* throughout the whole movie, there is no development of his character. He complains, he insults, and he contributes nothing. He even makes the other characters haul him upward through rooms with their shirts rather that climbing himself.
9.) The reveal that traps can be determined by prime numbers is decided after only two cases and "proven" without booting the room. The characters are very bad at booting rooms even after deciding to go purely off the prime number theory and even when it's revealed that sound can trigger traps they never conduct sound checks on rooms again.
10.) One room is trapped with lasers and forces the characters to dodge incoming laser shots and this is done by character after character grabbing each other and slow-mo pushing them out of the way AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN. At what point do you realize YOU should move your own ass?
11.) There's some early drama directed toward the Ide character for being gruff and insensitive despite the fact that he's been surviving longer than anyone and is the one who taught everyone else how to boot rooms. Needlessly antagonizing this character, more than any other character, is a ****ing stupid idea.
12.) Multiple traps make no sense when you remember that there are doors on every face of each room. A ceiling fan trap and random cage bars appear out of the floor/ceiling and we conveniently never see how these things are sprouting out of the doors.
13.) Traps will just activate with no provocation. The telescoping tree trap only shows up when it's dramatically convenient, gas starts filling one of the rooms only when the writers can't figure out how to justify moving the characters into the next room, and the cage bars don't seem to serve any purpose other than to separate the characters for no apparent reason. Traps in the original movie are shown to be predicated on different sensors and learning what those sensors could be were important plot beats we entirely skip in this movie.
14.) Main Guy has some dumb backstory about his brother committing suicide played back on a screen which ends up being the only part of the movie in which we see outside of the Cube complex. This ultimately accomplishes nothing.
15.) When Main Guy is too slow to escape the telescoping tree room we get an extraordinarily confusing edit in which Robot Girl is shown to be comforting the now safe Not-Autistic Savant Kid intercut with a similar shot of Main Guy doing the same thing... which makes absolutely no sense. This also never amounts to anything.
16.) Not-Autistic Savant Kid is shown to be happy and understanding when Robot Girl casually questions his intent to leave when they reach the exit and it's made clear that she has no intention of leaving. Nothing in the movie suggests that he ever knew that she was a robot or had an reason whatsoever to stay behind.
Phew. There are way too many problems with this movie, and that's a real shame cause there was genuine opportunity to expand on, refine, and improve the original experience.
The original experience was more about the characters' attempts to divine the nature of the Cube, it's purpose, and figuring out how to navigate it together without chewing each others' heads off.
This movie is just characters bitching at each other, whining about boomers or zoomers, and two of them can't or won't act like a normal human beings while a third has one of the dumbest motives to kill I've heard in a real long time. I bet I could pull a random drug addict off the street and ask for them to give me an excuse for why they might kill someone and get an answer that makes more sense than this movie.
Final Verdict: [Weak]
Cube
Sci-Fi Thriller / Japanese / 2021
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
In my perusal of IMDb I discovered that there was a remake of Cube. I'm sure somebody considers that blasphemy, but I am 100% game for a remake of Cube, I think there are a lot of ways it could have been improved, namely by deepening the investigative process of the characters and cutting back on the gore a bit, though being that this is a Japanese remake, I'm not too confident about that.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"I hate adults."
"I hate young people."
"I hate young people."
We are not spared gore in this version of the story, unsurprisingly, though thankfully it's about as graphic as the original and not moreso.
To quickly summarize the original Cube: Multiple characters wake up in a series of cubic rooms all connected by doors on every face. Each room looks identical save for the lighting, however some rooms are trapped and those rooms are identifiable by the prime numbers found in the coordinates inside each door. The characters begin by "booting" each room, throwing boots into rooms to trip any possible traps before eventually discovering the traps can be noise sensitive too.
While the relationships between the mutual strangers becomes worse and worse, one of them is found to be an autistic savant who can calculate 3-digit prime numbers in his head and this is used to determine the first room of the building and find the exit. As tensions heighten and people kill each other, only the Savant makes it out alive, or so we guess. We never see outside the Cube, we never learn who made the Cube, why it exists, or why anyone was placed inside.
It's a big cliffhanger ending and as a high-concept psychological thriller, it works.
This is... similar, but different in some good ways and mostly some bad ways.
On the positives side, the characters are shown to be more resourceful with what they have, they not only use their boots to test for traps, but they use their shirts to make a rope ladder and even use the buttons on those shirts to write out equations on the surfaces in the rooms.
It's worth noting that given the mystery of the Cube, a remake has a lot of wiggle room to take creative liberties, though hopefully not so much as to totally expose everything about the Cube as the sequels did. One way in which the story is changed is the twist ending in which it is revealed that Main Girl is a robot of sorts who exists to secretly observe the other characters. I appreciate this twist especially because when we're shown her reintroduced into the Cube and happening upon another group she demonstrates an artificial series of blinks directed at every individual character, clearly registering each as a "player". If you restart the movie and watch her initial appearance again you can see that it's edited in a way that makes her appearance seem much more natural.
I think that's clever and I genuinely don't dislike the idea that one of the group is secretly an aspect of the Cube itself spying on them, like the cameras they assumed must exist.
What I don't like about it is while her behavior is eventually rationalized in this way, until that reveal, she just looks like a terribly written character. She doesn't emote, she's rarely the focus of anything that's happening, and when the characters are having an audible fight to the death in an adjacent room with an open door, she's just conveniently offscreen doing ****all.
It may be an unpopular opinion to take, but if your movie's plot is indistinguishable from shit writing, then your twist could use some work.
A couple more things I'll add is that the musical flavor is good, it's not all doom-and-gloom, but it's very synthy and moody, I like it. Also this movie seems to have more of a budget, so we get a greater opportunity to showcase some of the mechanisms of the Cube when the characters find the outside of it.
It's been a while since I've seen the original Cube, but I'm going to venture to say that about everything else was worse in this remake.
1.) There's some dumb lines like "who is Hiruto" after it's been established by honorifics that Hiruto is Main Guy's brother.
2.) The death of Psycho Guy looks retarded cause he's killed by some ludicrous telescoping metal tree thing that turns him into a scarecrow.
3.) When Psycho Guy tries to strangle Main Guy it looks like the laziest attempt to choke someone I've ever seen.
4.) Psycho Guy's heel-turn is stupid as shit because the rationalization is that he works at a convenience store and hates getting bullied by middle schoolers, so he wants to kill himself, but he can't kill himself for whatever reason therefor he wants to kill total strangers. WHAT.
5.) This movie inserts several lines needlessly making generational hatred a theme of the movie, where the Not-Austistic Savant Kid claims to "hate adults" while Grandpa says "I hate young people". This never amounts to anything whatsoever.
6.) Psycho Guy even says he "hates adults" and kills Grandpa then rejoins the group and says "children shouldn't get in the way of adults" to Not-Autistic Savant Kid. So you're an adult when it's convenient?
7.) Not-Autistic Savant Kid isn't autistic or a savant, he's just a kid who knows how to calculate prime numbers and he's not the only character that can do that. So instead of getting a genuine, but annoying, autistic character (who served as a danger to the group and therefor a moral dilemma), we get an amateur child actor.
8.) Grandpa's a constant ******* throughout the whole movie, there is no development of his character. He complains, he insults, and he contributes nothing. He even makes the other characters haul him upward through rooms with their shirts rather that climbing himself.
9.) The reveal that traps can be determined by prime numbers is decided after only two cases and "proven" without booting the room. The characters are very bad at booting rooms even after deciding to go purely off the prime number theory and even when it's revealed that sound can trigger traps they never conduct sound checks on rooms again.
10.) One room is trapped with lasers and forces the characters to dodge incoming laser shots and this is done by character after character grabbing each other and slow-mo pushing them out of the way AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN. At what point do you realize YOU should move your own ass?
11.) There's some early drama directed toward the Ide character for being gruff and insensitive despite the fact that he's been surviving longer than anyone and is the one who taught everyone else how to boot rooms. Needlessly antagonizing this character, more than any other character, is a ****ing stupid idea.
12.) Multiple traps make no sense when you remember that there are doors on every face of each room. A ceiling fan trap and random cage bars appear out of the floor/ceiling and we conveniently never see how these things are sprouting out of the doors.
13.) Traps will just activate with no provocation. The telescoping tree trap only shows up when it's dramatically convenient, gas starts filling one of the rooms only when the writers can't figure out how to justify moving the characters into the next room, and the cage bars don't seem to serve any purpose other than to separate the characters for no apparent reason. Traps in the original movie are shown to be predicated on different sensors and learning what those sensors could be were important plot beats we entirely skip in this movie.
14.) Main Guy has some dumb backstory about his brother committing suicide played back on a screen which ends up being the only part of the movie in which we see outside of the Cube complex. This ultimately accomplishes nothing.
15.) When Main Guy is too slow to escape the telescoping tree room we get an extraordinarily confusing edit in which Robot Girl is shown to be comforting the now safe Not-Autistic Savant Kid intercut with a similar shot of Main Guy doing the same thing... which makes absolutely no sense. This also never amounts to anything.
16.) Not-Autistic Savant Kid is shown to be happy and understanding when Robot Girl casually questions his intent to leave when they reach the exit and it's made clear that she has no intention of leaving. Nothing in the movie suggests that he ever knew that she was a robot or had an reason whatsoever to stay behind.
Phew. There are way too many problems with this movie, and that's a real shame cause there was genuine opportunity to expand on, refine, and improve the original experience.
The original experience was more about the characters' attempts to divine the nature of the Cube, it's purpose, and figuring out how to navigate it together without chewing each others' heads off.
This movie is just characters bitching at each other, whining about boomers or zoomers, and two of them can't or won't act like a normal human beings while a third has one of the dumbest motives to kill I've heard in a real long time. I bet I could pull a random drug addict off the street and ask for them to give me an excuse for why they might kill someone and get an answer that makes more sense than this movie.
Final Verdict: [Weak]