Cube Zero (2004)

Cube Zero: Directed by Ernie Barbarash. With Zachary Bennett, David Huband, Stephanie Moore, Martin Roach. A young programmer whose job is to watch over the reality-warping Cube defies orders to rescue an innocent mother trapped in one of its rooms.

“I was one of the enthusiasts of the original. It seemed a clever solution to one of filmdoms most persistent challenges: how to stage drama.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eNoir is our most basic cinematic model. The core of noir is a universe where capricious fate toys with human destiny in cruel and arbitrary ways. u0026quot;Cubeu0026quot; cleverly merged a modern noir vision with a solution to the staging problem.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThen along came the sequel which had no understanding of what made the original appealing and important. They turned it into a conventional government plot thriller with all the baggage that carries. Along the way, they introduced some pseudomathematical notions that were bizarre.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eIf there is anyone on the planet that would know how such a government program would work, it would be me. I wrote a comment about this which triggered a couple dozen messages among the editor of a film magazine, myself and the original author of u0026quot;Hypercube.u0026quot;u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eAs it happens, the original script was more true to what made the first one work, but it was coopted and changed by the same hack behind this.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eSo once again, here we have some sort of evil experiment by some agency. In the last one, that was actually a major weapons company. The one clever idea is similar to u0026quot;Saw,u0026quot; where we watch the watchers of watchers watch. This folding is supposed to impute an evil to us that we see in the maniacal Dennis Hopper impersonator.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eOne of the intermediate watchers draws comics. This is textbook folding. Not clever, not worthy.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eTedu0026#39;s Evaluation — 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.”