Cube 2: Hypercube
| Cube 2: Hypercube | |
|---|---|
 Cube 2: Hypercube film poster | |
| Directed by | Andrzej Sekula |
| Written by | Sean Hood |
| Produced by | Ernie Barbarash Peter Block Suzanne Colvin |
| Starring | Kari Matchett Geraint Wyn Davies Grace Lynn Kung |
| Cinematography | Andrzej Sekula |
| Edited by | Mark Sanders |
| Music by | Norman Orenstein |
| Distributed by | Lions Gate Films |
Release date | 2002 |
Running time | 95 min |
| Language | English |
Template:Redirect5 Cube 2: Hypercube is the sequel of the science fiction movie Cube. Released in 2002, Hypercube had a bigger budget than its predecessor, and a new director, Andrzej Sekula.
The Industrial style rooms of the first movie are replaced with high-tech, brightly-lit chambers; the plausible technology of the traps — flamethrowers and extending spikes — are replaced with floating shapes with razor-sharp angles and shimmering translucent walls that disintegrate matter. The group discovers that the cubes are moving, not with lumbering slowness, but instantaneously. They realize they are inside a functioning tesseract in which gravity seems to shift, space distorts and time splits off into many separate paths. While some hailed the sequel as inspired madness, others derided it as brilliantly conceived but poorly executed. Particular criticisms include the level of acting and confusing ending.
Time and Space
In the Hypercube, time and space seem to merge into one (hence, a 4-dimensional shape). The film has several facets.
- First is the interpersonal relationships between the different people who find themselves inside this prison and the choices they make regarding survival.
- Second, the reason each person is inside the prison, which has to do with their various relationships to a defense company called Izon.
- Third, there is a sub-plot which by the end of the film takes over from the simpler story of survival. It regards the possible existence of a hacker called Alex Trusk, who some of the characters believe is linked to the Cube's construction.
Cannibalism
The first angle takes on a unique twist in the unusual environment of the tesseract. No fixed concept of time and space means that some events happen repeatedly. Also within a tesseract, people can meet themselves. This, coupled with the incarceration, has an obvious impact on the characters. Indeed, one of them - Jerry - is killed (and eaten, it is implied) by Simon, the private detective, again and again. The softer, more human Jerry, oblivious to the plights of his alternate selves seems to fall victim to the same character throughout the latter stages of the film. After each murder, Simon takes Jerry's watch.
By the end of the movie we see that Simon (now aged by many years) has dozens of identical watches up and down both arms, several ID tags (from the Izon employee he was hired to find) and he tells us that he has survived for years in the hypercube through cannibalism.
This is an allegory of the will to survive: even though there is seemingly no way to escape the hypercube, and no real quality of life to be had in killing and eating "the same" man over and over, our cannibal continues to pursue his goal: survival.
Relationships to Izon
Each of the characters begins to realize that it is his or her relationship with a company called Izon that seems to be the common thread between the prisoners. To one degree or another it appears that each character posed a threat to the Cube's existence becoming known by the wider public.
- Simon Grady — a private detective who was searching for a missing Izon worker, Rebecca Young, who was also imprisoned in the Cube. He becomes insane and survives by cannabilism until the cube implodes.
- Max — a computer hacker who is involved in a legal dispute with a company, Cyber Thrill, that stole his idea for a game. That company used the idea to make the cube and is a subsidiary of Izon. He dies of rapid aging/starvation. (Death not shown on screen.)
- Julia — a defense lawyer for Izon. Dies of rapid aging/starvation with Max.
- Mrs. Paley — a retired theoretical mathematician with Alzheimer's disease who previously worked for Izon. Is murdered by Simon.
- Colonel Thomas H. Maguire — a man who seems to have been intimately linked with the project. He references the first film by angrily crying that "The first one had numbers, dammit! At least give me something!" He is killed by the shifting of rooms one through another after handcuffing himself inside a room.
- Jerry Whitehall — a designer who worked on some of the Cube's mechanisms including the touch panels for the doors. He also seems to have a rough understanding of Quantum Physics. He is killed by a spinning cube trying to save Mrs Paley. Further more, other incarnations of him are killed and eaten many more times by the insane Simon.
- Sasha — a blind teenager whose link only becomes known in the last few minutes of the film and is in fact Alex Trusk. Her neck is broken by Simon.
- Kate Filmore — a psychologist whose link is also revealed at the film's end in a plot twist. She escapes the Cube but is shot by a soldier. An alternate ending shows Kate to have been a special soldier who apparently went into the Cube to retrieve Trusk's necklace/recording device.
- Dr. Rozenzweig — a Nobel Prize nominee who was imprisoned within the cube for a while and was found by Kate's group. He is the person who deduces when the Cube's unstable nature will destroy itself. It seems that this was his purpose in the Hypercube as he was left with a pen. He dies of starvation.
The sub-plot
As characters haggle about who could be responsible for building the Cube and what its purpose might be, the hacker states he knows who is responsible. He says a mythical hacker known as Alex Trusk is behind the project. His evidence is that the Cube bears all the hallmarks of a computer game and fits in with the way Trusk thinks. Other characters dispute this assertion (most notably Jerry, who believes Trusk is a myth).
The film ends with the revelation that the blind girl Sasha is in fact the real life Alex Trusk. She explains that she was horrified to learn people are being put into the cube. She stole important information to reveal its existence and then hid inside the Cube, reasoning that her employers would not search for her there. In the film's closing minutes, after revealing her true identity, she is killed by Simon and her necklace taken by Kate. Upon retrieving the necklace, Kate escapes the Cube and it is revealed that all along she was working for its builders. She hands the necklace over to her bosses because it contains a data storage device. They congratulate her and while she is being thanked, she is executed with a shot to the head.
Thus, every single prisoner of the Cube has died.
Cube 2 was followed by Cube Zero, a prequel to the original film.
Traps
All traps in the hypercube are a result of its unbalanced nature, and the fact that it is merely one room with doors leading to the same room in a different state — in four dimensions (time and space):
- Some rooms appear to shift gravity — this is merely the next room being rotated relative to the previous room (such rotations are never less than 90 degrees, so the doors always line up)
- Some rooms move in time and/or space relative to other cubes. So time in one room may go faster relative to another, and observers in one room may even see occupants of another room age quickly.
- Rooms may move through each other:
- The simplest observance of a room passing through another is moving walls, especially where the cube moving into the observer's room has faster time. The Colonel died when a room with faster time moved into the room he was in, aging part of his body much faster than the rest.
- A room may pass through another in stages (or possibly, many rooms passing through another), as crystalline columns.
- "The Expanding Tesseract" is one result of the hypercube's movement through itself — the edges of a small spinning tesseract which expands as it moves through the observed room temporally, until it fills the room, and then reduces again as it leaves. The Expanding Tesseract cuts like blades as anything which occupies the same space as the tesseract is subject to the properties of the tesseract "room(s)" — for instance, time in the tesseract room(s) may be relatively faster, resulting in a similar effect to the one which killed the Colonel. Jerry is killed by these blades saving Mrs Paley. Ultimately he is still alive though, in an alternate reality cube. The tesseract homes in on moving targets for no obvious reason.
- Rooms may also lose all gravity, if people start having sex in them.
See also
- Cube series for more details about how this film relates to the other Cube movies.
External links
