James's Weblog

On the other side of the movie spectrum, I watched the rather disappointing Cube last night.

I try not to write about the nitpicks I have with movies, especially with non-mainstream movies like Cube, because who really wants to read someone complaining? But I just can’t help myself.

The bad math soured a lot of the experience. For example (spoilers ahead):

• Leaven is supposedly a math whiz (she mentally can compute 26×26×26 in an instant), yet she spends many seconds pondering whether 645 and 372 are primes.
• Leaven somehow concludes that rooms numbered with powers of primes are traps. She then states that she can’t identify such numbers (so how did she devise this theory in the first place then?), because factoring “astronomical” numbers is extremely hard. While that’s certainly true, three-digit numbers are hardly “astronomical”. Furthermore, if she needs only to identify powers-of-primes, computing a reverse lookup table is quite feasible. No factoring necessary! And let’s not forget that she had no difficulty distinguishing primes from non-primes before, which is just as hard. (As for how and where she’d record a lookup table, clearly there was enough blood to go around.)
• Leaven just jumps to way too many supposedly logical conclusions with little-to-no corroborating evidence. Adding digits together produces Cartesian coordinates? Subtracting them produces permutations? (I’m still trying to figure out what that means.) The shifting rooms eventually must return to their original location? Maybe whoever kidnapped her also secretly provided her with a handy jump-to-conclusions mat.

You’d think a film with mathematics as such a central element would have been screened by someone who aced high-school mathematics. The filmmakers are Canadian too! They don’t even have the lousy American educational system to blame. (Maybe Canadians really are slow, eh?)

And there are plenty of other things not to like about it too:

• The lame ending.
• Too many unexplained plot details. Sometimes it’s good to leave things to the audience’s imagination, but Cube instead left me thinking that the filmmakers were just too lazy to figure out how to write themselves out of a corner.
• Almost all of the characters were unlikable, shallow, and stereotypical, and not enough of them died grisly deaths. The only two graphic ones involved characters we didn’t get to know.
• The dialogue was stiff, and the actors often did not do a good job of overcoming it.
• Returning to the starting point merely acknowledged that the movie wasted more than an hour of my time.