by Garrett Smith, Contributor

Welcome to BIG IDEAS, SMALL BUDGETS, in which I will be examining movies that take big swings with shallow pockets. Everyone knows Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for $7,000, which is indeed an impressively small price tag for a legitimately exciting action movie. But if you told me you could make a movie about a musician that gets mistaken for a hitman for $7,000, I would believe you. I would, however, be less inclined to believe you could make a movie about a vampire lair that gets mistaken for a bar for that much money, just as a random example (From Dusk till Dawn cost $19 million). This column will focus on movies that I consider to have “big ideas” at their core and feel even larger when you consider how little money went into making them. I expect that most of the movies I cover will be genre movies, if not specifically science-fiction movies, and that I will be spoiling them in great detail.

This month we’ll be looking at one a personal favorite:

Cube (dir. dir. Vincenzo Natali, 1997)

Say, what’s the big idea?

Six strangers wake up inside of a Cube, which itself is a room inside a larger series of connected Cubes, with no memory of how they got there. As they maneuver from room to room in search of an exit, they discover that some rooms are “trapped” and rigged to kill them if they try to traverse through them. As the group looks for a pattern that might help them avoid these trapped rooms, their patience and sanity wears thin and they come to blows with one another. It’s not just a question of whether they will escape the Cube with their lives, but of whether it will be themselves or the Cube that they succumb to.

And they did that with how much money?

$350,000

Well how’d they pull that off?

As this movie moves towards its endgame, it is revealed that our characters are trapped not just in a few interconnected Cubes, but an enormous maze of Cubes that is itself a truly gigantic Cube that constantly changes the positions of its rooms, like a colossal Rubik’s Cube. An advantage of this movie’s premise is that every room is technically the same - the dimensions of every Cube are identical, with a door at the center of all six sides, and the only true differences between them are serial numbers etched into each doorway. This means one simple set is able to service this movie’s entire premise, which gets as deep as conspiracy theories about government experiments and the motivations of the military-industrial complex. Natali makes creative use of the Cube’s walls, projecting different colored lights through translucent gaps in the design, making each space feel somewhat unique and allowing the movie’s visuals to be at least a little dynamic.

Did it work?

When I first saw this movie as a teenager, I was pretty blown away by it. I didn’t think twice about how small it actually is. It felt like an interesting blend of paranoid sci-fi and gore-soaked haunted house movies, of no lesser quality than similar movies of its day that commanded much bigger budgets (Event Horizon, for instance, cost $60 million in 1997). In retrospect, I can see the difference between these movies. But in practice I would still personally argue that Cube is more successful at selling and investigating its premise. It can be a pretty cheesy experience, with performances that may aggravate some audiences, but I can’t imagine you won’t be thrilled by the practical effects and crafty set-design.

Was it successful?

Technically fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, Cube boasts a 63% Tomatometer score among critics and a 76% audience score. I’ve found conflicting information regarding its box office success - domestically it seems to have made only $500,000 or so, while I have found reports of up to $9 million in international box office.I would assume the international numbers must be somewhat accurate, as two sequels to this movie were produced which likely points to some sort of success here. There’s also a Japanese remake set to be released in October this year, and even an episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars (an animated television show ostensibly for children) that is based on this premise.

Why should I watch it?

This is genuinely one of my favorite sci-fi/horror movies. It’s essentially a “death game” movie in which varying ideologies are pitted against one another, which is a subgenre of horror that I’m really into. Especially as conspiracy theories make their way into the public sphere and our world digs deeper into warring dichotomies, Cube resonates as an investigation into how people are poisoned by perceived power while being controlled by real power. Cube makes the argument that we are all cogs in an unseen, unknowable machine which must be dismantled for us to find peace. There is no reforming the machine, as the machine is a Cube within a Cube within a Cube - it’s Cubes all the way down and must be destroyed. If you’d like to read more about my thematic interpretations of Cube, check out this piece I wrote for Cinema76.