by Garrett Smith, Contributor

It's the 25th Anniversary of what has become a cult classic, blending science-fiction with horror to exciting and surprising effect. As a fan of this franchise that will heartily recommend you seek out its sequels as well as the recent remake from Japan, I’d love to take this opportunity to investigate a big question with you and see what we can learn from trying to answer it.

What is a Cube?

At one point Holloway (Nicky Guadagni), a doctor, tries to describe it:

"Only the government could build something this ugly."

Quentin (Maurice Dean Wint), a cop, tries to counter her conspiracy theory:

"Who do you think the establishment is? It's just guys like me. Their desks are bigger, but their jobs aren't. They don't conspire; they buy boats."

And then offers a conspiracy theory of his own:

"This place is... remember Scaramanga? The bad guy in The Man With The Golden Gun? It's some rich psycho's entertainment."

But Worth (David Hewlett), an engineer that unwittingly built the Cube's outer shell by never asking who contracted him or why, has a different idea:

"This may be hard for you to understand, but there is no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It - it's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan."

Holloway now thinks she's starting to grasp what the Cube really is:

"It's all the same machine, right? The Pentagon; multinational corporations; the police. If you do one little job - you build a widget in Saskatoon - and the next thing you know, it's two miles under the desert, the essential component of a death machine."

Worth still isn't buying it. As someone that worked on the Cube without ever knowing its purpose, he understands better than anyone how something like this could come about:

"This is an accident; a forgotten, perpetual public works project. You think anybody wants to ask questions? All they want is a clear conscience and a fat paycheck."

But then why put people in it, Quentin wonders? Worth's haunting explanation is that the machine exists to protect and serve the machine:

"Because it's here. You have to use it, or you admit it's pointless."

Cube, Vincenzo Natali's 1997 low-budget science-fiction film, is the story of a small group of strangers that wake up inside of a Cube with no memory of how they got there. There is a door on every wall, including the floor and ceiling, each of which leads to another Cube of the same dimensions and design. Through trial and grizzly error, the group discovers that certain rooms are rigged with traps that kill its occupants instantly and their goal becomes decoding which rooms are safe to travel through and which are not as they attempt to find a way out.

I have such a deep affection for this movie that I unabashedly love its lesser sequels and count Cube among my favorite franchises. Something about its simplicity really speaks to me. It's a basic death-game story, with all the components you usually find within, including participants with opposing philosophies seemingly chosen specifically for this reason and a death machine that creates a powder keg situation within. Will the game kill them off or will they do that to each other first? It's like a season of The Real World that takes place in The Thunderdome.

I tend to like death-game stories because they're fertile ground for investigating various ideologies that get attributed to the characters. The main opposing forces of Cube are authoritarian and anti-, with much of the runtime dedicated to arguments about who is in charge in both a macro (of the Cube) and micro (of the group) sense. Quentin spends the movie defensively insisting that the government couldn't do something like this because they're not organized enough and therefore are not this kind of threat (note that his defense isn't that they wouldn't), while Holloway comes off as if she's suffering from paranoia because her distrust of the government runs so deep. They represent the extremes of the American right and left, with the caveat that watching it in the context of history, Holloway is simply correct. And it's worth noting that, even when the movie is stereotyping Holloway as a bit of a ‘feminazi,’ it ultimately comes down pretty definitively on the side of anti-authority as Quentin is revealed to be a psychopath, poisoned by his own position of authority and the perceived power that comes with it, where Holloway is rarely anything but empathic and compassionate to the group.

But there's a third perspective in the mix that rises to the top as the movie goes along that is embodied by Worth, the quiet cog in the machine. He suggests that whatever purpose the Cube might have had is long forgotten, lost to a system that "stay[s] hidden. [They] keep everyone separated so the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing." A notion that the predicament they've found themselves in is so absurd as to be indecipherable from the inside, and indeed perhaps even from the outside. That the system of control they've been forced into is intentionally confusing; designed to obfuscate and be impossible to oppose. That even those in charge of various components of that system don't know enough about what the other components are doing to understand the true nature of the whole system and thus its effect on those trapped within it. Its only purpose is to self-perpetuate.

Any of that starting to sound familiar? For one thing, it’s an idea that this summer’s Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2023) investigates as well, but from the perspective of the designers of the death machine. But what I recognize most in Cube isn’t just one specific event or circumstance. It’s the whole system; the whole American machine. As the institutions America is built on continue to fail its citizens, it is clear that they were not designed to serve us, but rather the other way around. These institutions are irrelevant to our needs and confusing to navigate as a result. They are designed to prevent protest and instead get us blaming one another for failures at the core of the system. For instance - just off the top of my head - to recognize the lives and rights of women, people of color, and transgender individuals. It's no surprise that a white man is the soul survivor of Cube. In America, there are far less trapped rooms if you're a white man. It would therefore be accurate to say that these aren't failures of the system, but successes. That this is what it was built to do; to self-perpetuate.

My fascination with Cube started as enjoyment of a B-movie I discovered back when renting discs from Netflix was a new and wonderful frontier. The acting is wildly over the top, the sets are creatively cheap, and the premise is deliciously odd. But as I've watched and re-watched this movie over the years, and the world around me has continued to become a more confusing and troubling place, I've come around to thinking that Cube is far more than a bit of cheap entertainment. It has provided us a clever shorthand we can use to describe systems that are not serving a discernible purpose.

Social Media is a Cube.
2nd Amendment Rights are a Cube.
Police are a Cube.
Private Prisons are a Cube.

America is a Cube.

Once this shorthand is established, you start to see Cubes everywhere and feel a bit like the conspiracy theorists at the center of this series. Especially because it eventually leads to some tough conclusions, such as the one above, or even tougher yet, the ultimate conclusion one eventually reaches when investigating this idea:

It's Cubes all the way down.

But like the characters at the center of Cube, we have to recognize the patterns and see a Cube for what it really is – a Cube cannot be reformed; it can only be dismantled. 

25 years after its release, Cube is perhaps more relevant than ever, and offers us a box to put our confusion in so that we can sort through it with clarity. Not to mention a thrilling bit of sci-fi shenanigans that is just as worth revisiting as an entertainment.