Cube (Pacific Rim?!)

[TGLS]

Haven't watched the review yet but the picture seems wrong.


EDIT: Nevermind the picture was updated.

[sayla0079]

lol in an ironic twist I have ds9 s7 playing on my dvd player at the same time.

[clearspira]

David Hewlett is one of those actors who deserves far more credit than I think he gets. Take Dr Mackay as an example: as written, that character should be a Neelix. He's smug, selfish, arrogant and cowardly. And like Chris Barrie's Rimmer, its his acting that elevates him into someone that the audience loves not the material. Its clear from both of their first appearances that they are not meant to be loved.

As for Holloway, she is a dumbass. Protip: once it has been firmly established that the man you are trapped with is a violent and greatly stressed psychopath STOP TAUNTING HIM. What did she think the end result of continuously laughing in his face was going to be exactly? And she looks so shocked when his face changes to murder when she is at his mercy too lol.

[Jonathan101]

As for Holloway, she is a dumbass. Protip: once it has been firmly established that the man you are trapped with is a violent and greatly stressed psychopath STOP TAUNTING HIM. What did she think the end result of continuously laughing in his face was going to be exactly? And she looks so shocked when his face changes to murder when she is at his mercy too lol.

She didn't think he was a psychopath (and depending on what definitions you are using he isn't really); she thought he was an angry guy with a violent temper who thought with his dick more often than he should, but still had a conscience somewhere in there. The taunting was meant to shame him into realising he was taking things too far and stopping himself. The problem was less that she was wrong and more that she underestimated how far gone he was.

If he was the sort of person she thought he was, he wouldn't have killed her. In fact he did indeed try and save her and it was only when despair kicked in that he decided to let her drop.

Also, trivia- the prequel implies that Kazan was not as innocent as he appeared either.

[clearspira]

As for Holloway, she is a dumbass. Protip: once it has been firmly established that the man you are trapped with is a violent and greatly stressed psychopath STOP TAUNTING HIM. What did she think the end result of continuously laughing in his face was going to be exactly? And she looks so shocked when his face changes to murder when she is at his mercy too lol.

Also, trivia- the prequel implies that Kazan was not as innocent as he appeared either.

I wondered what Chuck was referencing at the end as I have not seen it. I have a long-standing hatred of prequels in general mainly because they pull retcons that completely change and often ruins the meaning of the original film.

I have seen Hypercube though - my opinion on that film is that its a fairly neat idea but its execution was poor. I suspect I would like it more if it was an original film as opposed to a sequel to a cult classic.

[Jonathan101]

As for Holloway, she is a dumbass. Protip: once it has been firmly established that the man you are trapped with is a violent and greatly stressed psychopath STOP TAUNTING HIM. What did she think the end result of continuously laughing in his face was going to be exactly? And she looks so shocked when his face changes to murder when she is at his mercy too lol.

Also, trivia- the prequel implies that Kazan was not as innocent as he appeared either.

I wondered what Chuck was referencing at the end as I have not seen it. I have a long-standing hatred of prequels in general mainly because they pull retcons that completely change and often ruins the meaning of the original film.

I have seen Hypercube though - my opinion on that film is that its a fairly neat idea but its execution was poor. I suspect I would like it more if it was an original film as opposed to a sequel to a cult classic.

Basically, in the prequel, we see the overseers of the Cube as they monitor a bunch of condemned prisoners go through the torture. One of them, a math prodigy, gradually realises that the people forced to take part aren't actually guilty of anything other than opposing the theocratic regime that runs the country / world, so he rebels and gets lobotomised and thrown in the Cube himself and acts similarly to Kazan, implying that Kazan wasn't actually autistic but a lobotomised former overseer himself.

That's arguably implied in the film itself mind, given how Kazan is introduced to us, but it goes against some of what Chuck was saying, including the idea the film puts forth about the Cube being the result of blind idiot bureaucracy rather than, as shown in the third movie, a definite torture chamber controlled by evil forces (though to be fair, I personally find that a bit more believable).

[FaxModem1]

I think the key problem of the Cube as needless bureaucracy argument for a theme is, well, most bureaucracies serve some sort of positive purpose, and it's when things are warped by other purposes, such as greed or power, that things get bent and twisted out of shape needing correction.

Throwing a lot of money into building a torture cube, where the people outside can't even monitor the results, makes you wonder why such a thing even got approved in the first place.

[TheStarWarsTrek]

(warning: wall of text). So the reason behind the cube is "It might have had a purpose once, but if so it's lost to time. It came to be through bureaucracy and apathy". Sorry, I might get some flak for this, but I call B.S.

I'm reminded of two things. First, outlandish conspiracy theories. Second, stupid movie villains like Lex Luthor in BvS or the villain in Voyager's Repression. They require the villains to be very smart in some areas, and very stupid in others. When you look at this cube, there's the engineering and technology that goes into making it move and the elaborate and varied death traps. There's the code with prime numbers, and letting the math student keep her glasses, which implies some foresight put into this puzzle. And even if the selection of victims is random, there has to be some coordination involved in kidnapping and transporting 7 different people around the same time, possibly across state lines. The creation of this cube involved the intelligence to make it happen . . . but also the stupidity to make it for no reason at all.

Now I know someone's going to say that I'm missing the point, that it's supposed to be about the unthinking apathy of bureaucracy. But even in bureaucracy, there's reason. In Chuck's example, it happened because Judges/Cops are pressured to make convictions. For a fictional example, in WH40K planets are forgotten due to filing errors. But there's a reason, it's because the Imperium is so massive and the bureaucrats are over worked. Cops are supposed to arrest people and sometimes strip search them, they just did it when it wasn't called for. Space bureaucrats are supposed to record info on planets, but sometimes it gets lost. There isn't some organization that's supposed to make giant torture cubes as part of it's normal mission.

Someone had to have placed the order for the parts needed for the cube. Someone had to have been hired as a kidnapper or talked into doing it for patriotism or some other reason. There's a big difference between "bureaucracy and apathy mean an innocent is arrested" and "bureaucracy and apathy mean we'll build a huge machine that pointlessly kills people, but also gives them info on how to possibly escape". I mean, is there also a huge underground facility nearby that runs birds through obstacle courses, and every the state bird of Idaho wins they hire a sniper to kill a random person in Idaho? By the logic of this movie, it could happen, because we're all part of an uncaring machine, man.

If it did have a purpose a long time ago, then A) it can't have been that long because David Hewlett's character designed part of it B) I as the audience want to know what that purpose is dammit. Like, maybe it was a rich sadist who built this thing, the sadist was killed by a rival gangster, but his minions keep doing this cuz no one told them to stop. Or we go full sci fi, this thing was built for Vault Tec type experiments, and robots keep kidnapping people long after the war is over because of their programming.

With what Chuck was saying during the background video about the idea for the cube being hell, I thought for sure there was going to be a scene where they find out the size of the cube is mathematically impossible, and they're literally in hell.

[Jonathan101]

I think the key problem of the Cube as needless bureaucracy argument for a theme is, well, most bureaucracies serve some sort of positive purpose, and it's when things are warped by other purposes, such as greed or power, that things get bent and twisted out of shape needing correction.

Throwing a lot of money into building a torture cube, where the people outside can't even monitor the results, makes you wonder why such a thing even got approved in the first place.

In the prequel it is shown that they can and do monitor what is happening inside the Cube, but we just don't see that in this film.

And yeah. A regular bloated or incompetent bureaucracy will likely have some evil and harm done in consequence of itself, but a massive death torture-chamber where people are abducted and thrown into...that's far too extreme, and implies at least some level of conscious malevolence. The alternative is an unbelievably extreme level of stupidity beyond that which exists in real life bureaucracies.

Chuck used the example of innocent people being thrown in prison because nobody wanted to admit at any level that some sort of mistake had been made, but the Cube would be an example where the people who designed the prison must have been crazy or evil, and the people putting in the death traps at least would have to be exceptionally dumb to not wonder "hey, wait a minute- are we the bad guys?"

I think you can read the film as intentionally ambiguous on that front at least- yes, the characters and script argue that the Cube is just an accident that got out of hand, but the choice of victims doesn't seem random when it includes an anti-government conspiracy theorist, an expert on prison escapes, one of the engineers who worked on the Cube, a math genius (perhaps she and the escape artist were put in there to test how inescapable the Cube was), and an imbalanced cop (I could easily see him actually being responsible for arresting some of these guys and not admitting to it, only to get thrown in himself for being unreliable or just knowing too much). It really does look more like a list of people an evil government might want rid of than people who are victims of random chance.

Granted, something like the Cube is an especially cruel and convoluted way of getting rid of your enemies- this could easily be the same evil government that comes up with the Purge to be honest- but it still makes more sense than just red tape taken to a bloody extreme.

Basically...Chuck is looking at this through the eyes of a Libertarian.

[FaxModem1]

Another big issue is what happens to Kazan. If this is just a government needlessly torturing people for shits and giggles, then later to justify why they built the damn thing in the first place, what happens to him once he escapes? I'm not picturing a few caretakers waiting outside with hot chocolate and blankets to help him deal with any potential trauma he must have gone through, I'm picturing either study, more torture, incarceration, or a blank shooting in the head to silence him ,which underwrites any sort of 'innocence survives' theme that they have.