Review of Cube 2: Hypercube (2002) by Brian Z — 01 Dec 2009

What can I say about this movie that hasn't already been said? It wasn't good as the other two, simply because there was no explanation at the end of how escaping worked but at the same time, this was the most mind-bending movie of the trilogy and to me, that's worth quite a bit.

This is my favorite of the three movies because of its creativity and it's my least favorite because of a lack of creativity. What I mean is that this movie doesn't offer much of anything so far as plot, character story or explanation of the "Cube's" existence that doesn't already exist in the first, on top of that, it was done better in the first. We learned more about each character, instead of just two or three depending on how deep you want to go with it. It took longer to identify the bad guy in the first and when you knew who he was, he was far less likable. In this one, it just seemed like a guy trying to survive, not completely unlikable, but still and maybe the controversy makes the movie better depending on the viewer.

As for the creativity that the movie introduced, it was mostly all in the traps (traps in a movie by Lions Gate? Where have I heard this before?). The rooms in this one bent reality, they shifted gravity, defied space and time and were a little more reliant on computer generated special effects than the first or third movie, to the movie's detriment I might add. The most important point about these new, sci-fi based traps is that it allowed the movie to contain the creepiest and therefore my favorite, scene of any horror movie. Anybody who's watched this movie and recalls the aftermath of the sex scene knows exactly what I'm talking about (everybody else will just have to watch it to find out).

Despite how far this movie falls short of meeting the expectations that Cube 1 left, there is one more redeeming quality making this unique installment of the trilogy capable of justifying its own existence.

As an amateur filmmaker (although I was still stuck on Movie Maker when I watched this movie), the editing in the beginning was enough to make me fantasize over the first few minutes days after the fact. Black bars ran across the scenes creating borders where three, four maybe more video clips could slide, fade or dissolve into, illustrating the characters narrations so seamlessly and allowing the exposition to occur without slowing down the story at all and in fact, speeding it up a little but not so much that they couldn't return to wandering around aimlessly for over half an hour (something that wouldn't have been a big deal if it weren't for the fact that this was already done for most of the first movie).