Cube Zero...or as I like to call it, Cube Cubed

Ahh, Cube. How I've missed your incoherent and torturous ways. Shine your light on me and open my eyes to the mysteries of Cube and Cube 2: Hypercube!

Cube Zero is the prequel to the other two Cube movies, and we actually find out what the cube is (or maybe they told us before and I just wasn't paying attention). Bacially the cube is a military experiment (more fun than Abu Ghraib!). What exactly they're trying to learn, I'm not sure, but suppposedly the people in the cube are people that have been sentenced to death who are given a choice between death and being put in the cube (so basically a choice between death and a worse death). The guinea pigs' memories are erased, then they're set free to run willy nilly through the cube.

Cube Zero returns to the simple tortures of Cube: acid, decapitating wires, and biological agents. None of that weird ass Hypercube shit. We meet another group of people who trapped in the cube: a blonde woman who is looking for her daughter who may or may not have signed a release form, another angry black man who wants to kill everyone, a fat man who bites it in several fashions (a biological agent which I thought was the start of a zombie movie, getting thrown down a hole into another cube, and eventually having his head explode from sound waves). One of the tech guys on the outside decides he loves the blonde woman and must go save her, so he enters the cube to help her. This prompts one of the higher ups, a man with a diamond or a laser beam or something for an eye, to come to the basement and eliminate the guy who went in the cube, but his coworker starts sabotaging the cube which will provide them with just enough time to escape. But wait, the angry black man was in the military, which means that he has a biochip in his brain that can be used to turn him evil (you can tell he's evil because his eyes turn green) and kill the tech guy and his newfound love before they escape. Blonde girl rushes in and saves the day just as he's about to squash tech guy by delivering a swift kick to the angry black man's nuts. Apparently the pain inhibitors don't cover testicles. Tech guy and blonde girl escape from the cube, which is apparently under water. They run through the forest, where tech guy is caught, but blonde girl escapes. Tech guy is sentenced to death, and what do you know, he's going to be put back into the cube because he signed a release form a long time ago. We end seeing a new set of people in the cube, including an autistic boy, which leaves us where Cube picks up.

While I was watching Cube Zero, I kept thinking that it had a bit of a Jean Pierre Jeunet-ish feel, and then in the commentary, the director said he wanted Cube Zero to have more of a City of Lost Children feel than a Cube 2 feel. Other tidbits learned from The Making of Cube Zero: Cube Zero is really about religion and authority (when one of the people made it out of the cube, he's asked if he believes in God, and when he says no (they all say no), he's set on fire); all of the actors have stories of how they almost died in the cube (how's that for ironic); there is a Cube mythology, and everyone involved in the film has a different idea of what the cube "means" (except for the guy who played the tech guy, who, and I love him for this, "just thinks the cube is pretty".

The special features also included a music video of a band playing a heavy metal song inside the cube, interspersed with scenes of people dying in the movie. Apparently the producers of the dvd thought they were as bad as I did, since they didn't even bother to include the name of the band or the song with the video.