Cube (Pacific Rim?!)

[clearspira]

The other social experiment that proves just how dismissive the human race can be to suffering is of course the one we are all taking part in right now: the internet.

[Jonathan101]

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?"

Honestly I think that was an intentional part of the horror in the movie. Sort of a "banality of evil" thing. As Pratchett put it in Small Gods:

"There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do."

(...)

So, the "banality of evil" is a falsehood more often than not, particularly in the way it is commonly understood. Office drones also have the advantage of not having to deal with much more than paperwork, while the people who built the Cube must have noticed that they just built a room full of spikes that shoot out the moment someone so much as whispers.

The character who brought up the idea was literally one of the people who built the cube. That's pretty much the purpose of Worth as a character; he's directly complicit but he's just... some guy.

He sees himself as just "some guy" but we don't get to know him well enough to make that judgement. Realistically and psychologically speaking what Worth said says more about Worth than himself.

He also was responsible only for the outer shell of the Cube, so he's not really the same as the ones who worked on the actual death traps.

[Jonathan101]

The thing with the Cube is, no one building/operating it ever has to personally kill someone. And the average person's sense of moral responsibility and outrage is reduced significantly if the violence being done is kept remote and only relayed to them in abstract terms.

Some people built the Cube, knowing it's a death trap, but tons of people build deadly machinery (bombs, guns, tanks, etc.) for the government all the time without feeling much guilt. They can tell themselves the government must have a good reason for wanting this built, and as long as they don't have to see it in action, or know for sure that it's actually been used on people, that should be good enough for most of them.

Some people had to kidnap the folks who are put in the Cube. For that you do need people who have a very low appreciation for things like civil liberties, and are willing to abduct seemingly innocent people because the government ordered them to. But there's no need for the kidnappers to be told anything about elaborate and purposeless death mazes, so they can take comfort in the idea that the people they've kidnapped might still be alive and relatively unharmed.

Now, the overseers of the project can't claim ignorance, obviously, but they also never have to view their handiwork first hand. They don't need to see the people they're condemning to death, or the gruesome corpses they leave behind. For them it's all just abstract ideas; there's no visceral component to drive home the horror of what they're doing. Like, there's tons of people who will vote in favor of going to war with Country X, but if you actually put a gun in their hand and tell them to shoot a soldier from Country X, they'll completely balk, because agreeing to the idea of something has a very different psychological effect from carrying it out yourself.

The people likely to have the most moral reservations are the ones who have to put the unconscious people in the Cube and clear out the dead bodies afterwards (though, if the overseers are smart, they'd make sure those tasks are carried out by different people who have no contact with each other). But these people are essentially janitors. While they can't take comfort in ignorance, they can take comfort in thinking that their actions don't really contribute anything meaningful to the horrors going on. They're just moving objects from Spot A to Spot B; anyone can do that, and if they resign in moral protest, then someone else will come right in and do it instead. You can justify being party to all sorts of horrible things so long as you believe your actions won't affect the outcome one way or the other.

None of that is what Chuck or the movie seems to be arguing though.

What they were saying is that the ENTIRE CUBE was basically an accident, with no real malevolence involved at ANY level.

Which is patently absurd given the kidnapping and murders and everything else.

[TheStarWarsTrek]

None of that is what Chuck or the movie seems to be arguing though.

What they were saying is that the ENTIRE CUBE was basically an accident, with no real malevolence involved at ANY level.

Which is patently absurd given the kidnapping and murders and everything else.

Agree 100%.

I'll believe that a pencil pusher can design a metal box and not think about it. I'll even believe that some soldiers or thugs or whoever will kidnap people without asking questions and justify it with "I'm just following orders". But the complexity of the cube, the elaborate nature of the death traps, the fact that the complex code was displayed, that they let the math student keep her glasses, that the victims were probably not random . . . that shows that someone, somewhere down the line, knew this thing was going to be used to test and kill people. That's not unthinking evil, that's thinking evil.

I understand the point it's going for, that people can cause (or at least enable) great harm by just doing a normal job. Someone listed the example of a person working in a bomb factory who dosn't think about where the bombs will be used. Another example is the player in Papers Please. But the movie stumbles in this message, talking about unthinking evil when this cube clearly had a lot of thought put into it.

People treat the whole "What about the construction workers on the second Death Star?" thing as a joke, but there are definitely some arguments about morality you can make with that situation. In this case the argument is muddied because the Death Star is really convoluted, and questions about it's origins are answered with "We're like, all part of a machine, man!"

[AuRon]

I don't think the argument is that there is no malevolence at any level, just that the original purpose of it has gotten lost or confused. So they just keep it going because they need to justify its existence, since it cost so much time and money to create.

[Jonathan101]

I don't think the argument is that there is no malevolence at any level, just that the original purpose of it has gotten lost or confused. So they just keep it going because they need to justify its existence, since it cost so much time and money to create.

Which is nonsensical, since people are being kidnapped (and clearly not at random) and murdered in the thing.

It is a little hard to see what, exactly, the original purpose of the Cube was if it was not "elaborate death machine", and if the death traps were somehow a later addition that is not a sunk cost fallacy issue but a "bought out by EVIL INC." issue.

[AuRon]

Most fiction is not going to be completely, 100% realistic, and is going to require a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. That's why this is considered a sci-fi movie. Of course, a particularly cynical person might say that it really doesn't require much suspension of disbelief.

Also, I don't see how people being kidnapped and murdered contradicts what I said. Yeah, they're doing it deliberately, but (as far as we know) not out of malice or enjoyment. Its more of a "its nothing personal, its just business" type thing. Even if that business is just keeping the cube running.

What was the original purpose? Maybe to be a training ground for soldiers? Maybe it was actually intended for convicts given the death penalty? Canada doesn't legally have a death penalty, but maybe that's why it was a secret project? Maybe it was some kind of elaborate experiment? Any number of things.

[Jonathan101]

Most fiction is not going to be completely, 100% realistic, and is going to require a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. That's why this is considered a sci-fi movie. Of course, a particularly cynical person might say that it really doesn't require much suspension of disbelief.

Also, I don't see how people being kidnapped and murdered contradicts what I said. Yeah, they're doing it deliberately, but (as far as we know) not out of malice or enjoyment. Its more of a "its nothing personal, its just business" type thing. Even if that business is just keeping the cube running.

What was the original purpose? Maybe to be a training ground for soldiers? Maybe it was actually intended for convicts given the death penalty? Canada doesn't legally have a death penalty, but maybe that's why it was a secret project? Maybe it was some kind of elaborate experiment? Any number of things.

"it's nothing personal, it's just business" is a stock phase of movie villains and would definitely count as "malice". Torturing and killing others for profit or to keep the machine running still counts as a malevolent motive.

If the death traps are there because this was a military training facility, that would be malevolence because nobody in their right mind would design a training course that could kill it's participants unless they were extremely unethical or uncommonly stupid.

If the Cube was designed or altered so that people could be executed in secret, that too would count as a malevolent motive. Whoever decided that was acceptable was not a good person, and whoever chose to let innocent people get kidnapped and thrown in there definitely wasn't a good person.

The victims were not random selections; they included one of the key engineers, a math student, an escape artist and a conspiracy theorist, and if they were all chosen "just because" that would be one Hell of a coincidence.

Let's put it another way- it is not completely impossible for the Cube to be designed for some other purpose and for all of this to be happening due to incompetent bureaucracy or whatever....it is just extremely unlikely, and far from the conclusion they should be jumping too- even if Worth claims to have investigated it and turned up exactly that, Worth should remember that he was an engineer and not a detective and might honestly just have been the wrong guy to look into that.

It is far more likely that the Cube was either designed to be evil from the outset, or corrupted by evil somewhere down the line, than for all of this to have just happened by accident- again, the example Chuck used of the innocent person who was arrested and processed because nobody wanted to admit that they had made a mistake doesn't gel with the pure murderousness on display in this movie. It's not surprising that the prequel shows that it really is a cruel experiment and execution chamber run by an Lawful Evil theocratic government for people it doesn't like, because that honestly makes more sense.

[Independent George]

What do we know?

1. The film is shot from a third person omnisicent perspective - we never see the person from the opening again, so it's not told from the view of the survivors.
2. There is clearly a world outside the cube from which the prisoners are obtained.
3. It's clear that nobody from outside the cube has any idea it exists.
4. The cube is gigantic.
5. The only time we see the exterior of the cube, it is dark. There are no stars visible, or any landscape around it.
6. The prisoners can be transported between cubes without any of them waking. Either they are drugged in their sleep, or teleported.

Based on this, I don't think a mundane explanation can exist. I think it's a lovecraftian genius loci that operates on its own logic. I think it cultivates people in our world to find the right mix of skills and personalities. If it was ever "built", it was because it wanted humans to think they built it; in fact it already existed, and the humans merely created a shell for it to inhabit.

ETA: I saw the film a long time ago, and had no interest in revisiting it; I'm going entirely off of Chuck's review and whatever memories it jarrred loose.

[Nealithi]

First I saw Cube a few years ago and found it interesting. And that it was basically one room with different lights turned on was awesome.
Now how does the cube get built. Just as was said. It had a purpose. Probably got repurposed more than once because it was some funded thing. Do your job earn your paycheck. Ask to many questions and it is time to see HR.
Is there malice? Yes. But, have you guys seen Malicious Compliance on youtube? They read submissions from Reddit. And most of the managers mentioned there. Would definitely grab a bunch of people and toss them into one of these thing just because it was a line item to do. The whole "I don't need to know how it works or why. Do what I said." Is the point behind this. It is a dark point of view from an examination of how dark things can be in the world.