Cube 2: Hypercube (2002) Reviews

• Going no where fast...

  aleinss-22003-03-01

  (* Includes Spoilers *) After seeing the original Cube, this movie is pretty bad. The people in the first movie actually all had to work together to get out of the Cube. And each one had a specific talent that made up the puzzle in getting out of it (i.e. no one person could get out alone). In this new movie the concept is the same but is never developed! People are just mindlessly roaming from room to room with no plan. The older woman supposedly has superior mathematical ability that should be able to decipher what the number 60659 means in each room, but she is too senile to do so! She's also quite annoying and adds nothing to the movie. The blind girl was suppose to blow the whistle on the whole thing, but is found out before doing so, so she escapes into the Hypercube. Never mind the fact that even though she can barely move from room to room due to her blindness, she has miraculously waltzed into the Hypercube! Traps have no logic to them, other then the eye candy factor. The ending: very weak and it doesn't make sense. Overall, a very disappointing movie to the first. Rating: 3/10

• Cube 2: Hypercube: 6/10

  movieguy10212004-07-05

  I've never really thought about it this way, but I suppose in most cases, it's an honor to have a sequel. Although no one liked the sequel, I'm sure Jonathon Lynn is proud that The Whole Nine Yards got a sequel somehow. And that seems like the case with Cube 2: Hypercube, a sequel to the cult hit Cube. But then one wonders how there can be a sequel to a movie that was basically all filmed in one 14x14x14 set? Well, Cube 2 is the answer-but not really the best one. It shows what Cube would have been if it had had a bigger budget, but it also showed what it didn't want to become. Strangers are thrown together into a series of interconnecting cubes yet again, but this time they're more high-tech. They're not different colors, and there's no booby traps. Instead, some rooms have a cube that attacks you (don't ask), some have gravity reversed, and time means nothing. There seems to be no pattern, like in the first one, so how are these people supposed to get out? This is all one big rehash of the first. There's the wandering around, talking about the past, and speculation of why they're in the cube. I guess that's for people who see sequels before the originals. The characters are all more broadly drawn, the dialogue is cheesier, and it looks faker. In the first, you barely knew anything about the giant cube they were in. Here, it seems like everyone was involved somehow. The ending, which was vague in the first, explained some more, which I was angry yet happy about. It's hard to explain. But then they left it in the air yet again. Maybe it's for the prequel, Cube Zero (due out sometime this year) to describe. But one positive difference between the two is that this one seemed to be overall scarier. It's not claustrophobia, but the idea of anything happening in a hypercube. Because they don't exist, everything goes wild here, allowing for some things to happen. It's all quite creepy. And although the random crazy psycho killer is more random here than the first, I liked him more, and he was great as he was going through the hypercube. Cube was an original, interesting, and disorienting movie. Cube 2 is the exact same thing, except not as good. My rating: 6/10 Rated R for language, some violence and brief nudity.

• Very Disappointing Sequel

  patrickoneill2006-08-04

  This is a truly bad sequel to the inventive and imaginative 'Cube'. It just feels like a made-for-TV, straight to the DVD bargain bin rehash of the first film. It doesn't have any atmosphere - getting rid of the dark metal and coloured lighting makes it look more like a trendy wine bar than a twisted death machine! Plus, why are the characters so unafraid? Kate (the psychotherapist) constantly smiles and acts like they're on some kind of office team-building event. It almost seems like waking up in a cube is not a new or frightening experience for them, "oh, right, we're in a cube again, how boring". Another major problem with the film lies in the main 'psycho' of the group Simon. He is basically a replica of Quentin the cop from the first Cube, but without any of the character development or motive. In the first film it does seem a little extreme when Quentin starts murdering people but at least he's had a few arguments with them first. Simon just starts killing people for fun - you can't kill an old woman because her Alzheimer's annoys you!! The film disappointed from the start. In the original there was a gruesome death scene within 2 minutes of the start. In 'Hypercube' the intro sequence is a boring overhead shot of people lying in hospital beds and then you have to wait an hour for the first death. Overall the film feels like a bigger budget, lower impact remake/rip-off of the original with no excitement, enthusiasm or interest.

• Fails on many levels

  DrLex2007-05-12

  Cube 2 is in many respects just a clone of the original Cube movie. Suppose you haven't seen that movie yet and consider watching this more recent version, which would probably be cooler because it has a larger budget and CGI... don't! Watch the original instead. If you like it, watch Cube Zero afterwards. Don't watch this one unless you really ache for more Cube- stuff. There are many things about Hypercube that don't work. Overall, it feels like a bad remake of an old classic. This is not surprising because that's exactly what it is, except for the fact that the original isn't really 'old' yet, it only predates this movie by 5 years. 'Cube 2' is populated by almost exactly the same characters as the first movie. The premise is also the same, even though they added an extra 'dimension' (literally). Of course it also differs from the original Cube in some ways. First, the complexity of the way in which the original 'cube' could be solved, is replaced by a simple concept which is made to look complex by means of cool-sounding terminology and random mathematical formulas. In the original movie, someone familiar with mathematics could follow the lines of thought of the characters, and people unfamiliar with maths could still feel that there was something substantial to it. In Cube 2, nobody understands what's happening, and this seems to include the makers of the movie themselves. Next, the original movie featured some gruesome yet inventive ways in which many of the characters died, involving traps with wires, fire, acid and so on. In 'Cube 2', characters are killed by computer graphics -- literally. If you expect more of the visceral gore like in Cube, you'll be heavily disappointed. Moreover, the effects looks cheap and dated. They're so obviously synthetic that it's distracting. Finally, there's a whole set of fresh actors. Unfortunately, the acting is rather bad. Unlike in the original 'Cube', I didn't care about any of the characters. Some even irritated me to such a degree that I wanted them to die quickly. 'Cube 2: Hypercube' feels as if somebody thought the original 'Cube' could be improved by throwing a bigger budget to it, and a crew which is skilled and has good tools, but has no clue of what made the original so good. It's a bit as if they just learned about the concept of a hypercube and found it so cool, that they thought a movie mostly based on this concept would be equally cool.

• Hypercube. The title should have given it away!

  DeviousMrBlonde2002-08-19

  Hypercube. That title is terrible but I placated myself with the idea that a Hypercube is actually a real theoretical mathematical construct. That it wasn't some misjudged attempt at a catchy title. It is just telling it how it is. The first one was called Cube and was set in a Cube, this one is called Hypercube and is set in a Hypercube. How wrong I was. Everything - absolutely everything - in this movie is designed to be "Bigger, Better, Faster"! And that is why it fails miserably. I loved the original Cube because of it's simplicity. It was what one might call a pseudo Science Fiction movie. It was a psychological thriller trying on the Science Fiction coat, and it worked to perfection. You thought, this is crazy BUT it could bloody well happen. It was (apparently) set in the here and now and everything in it was eerily possible. It would have cost an awful amount of money but it was possible, it was after all just a big mechanical Cube. Even the booby-traps were deceptively simple. The real beauty for me was that you never knew or got to know the why, where, or who in the first movie. The goal was simply to get out in one piece and each person had their individual skill to help achieve that goal. Cube2 enters the full realm of Science Fiction and immediately trips and falls flat on it's face. None of the simplicity is left. The `captors' in this new cube must deal with time shifting, gravity shifting, alternate realities, some weird killer time thingy that moves through the rooms and one of the crew who turns a bit psycho... just like the policeman character from the first movie, except (you guessed it) he's even a BIGGER psycho. On top of that the story tries to put a face on who is behind these experiments: The Izon Military Corp. (or something along those lines). This movie therefore is what 2010 was to 2001, albeit on a more modest level. And in the same way it just doesn't work Also, character development is practically nonexistent. For example one pair of characters disappear and are never seen again. Just like that, gone for no real reason except maybe to show the vastness of the Hypercube although another character seems adept at meeting the multiple instances of two other characters in particular. In the end you absolutely do not care for any of them or whether they can escape or not. The story gives you no reason to care for them. The idea of the Hypercube itself is too vast to make you care. As one character points out, the amount of possible rooms in a Hypercube is infinite. Therefore there is no real goal. The characters don't need each other to escape. There is no exit door in a Hypercube! So why bother at all? And as for the one-liners. The pain, oh the pain. The worst bit however is reserved for the end. The Über-Military guy's comments on the phone make it sound like they are really contemplating a Cube3. Spare us, please!