Trailer
Plot summary
A man named Alderson wakes in a room whose walls and floor are hatches. He enters another room, where a wire trap kills him. Five others meet elsewhere: Quentin, Rennes, Worth, Leaven, and Holloway. Quentin warns that he has seen traps in other rooms. Leaven notices three sets of numbers etched into the plates on each hatch, and she suggests that rooms whose plates carry prime numbers are the dangerous ones. Rennes throws his boot into a room to test his theory and then moves through the ones he believes are safe. The group encounters Kazan, a developmentally disabled man, and Holloway insists that he come along.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Cube (1997)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Cube barely lasted days in Canadian theaters, but French distributor Samuel Hadida spent $1.2 million marketing it and flew cast members to France, turning it into the second-highest-grossing film in the country that summer.
- Every character's surname is a hidden reference to a real prison: Quentin for San Quentin, Holloway for England's HM Prison Holloway, Rennes for a French penitentiary, and Leaven plus Worth spelling out Leavenworth.
- The film's recurring number-six motif was meant to extend to six differently colored rooms, but the budget only stretched to five gel-panel colors plus plain white, so the sixth color was never realized.
- Only one cube set was actually built, each of its sides measuring 14 feet, with just one working door that could support the weight of the actors; the color of the room was changed by sliding panels.
- Each room's numbered ID tag actually encodes its coordinates: the X, Y and Z position values are simply the digit sums of the room's three identification numbers.
- Before writing Cube, Natali developed the short film Elevated, set in an elevator to show investors how Cube would look and feel. Cinematographer Derek Rogers worked out strategies for shooting in the tightly confined elevator and reused them on a Toronto soundstage for Cube.
- The Cube was conceived by mathematician David W. Pravica, who was the math consultant: an outer cubical shell, or sarcophagus, 434 feet along each side, holding the inner cube rooms.
- Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat, shot entirely within a single small boat set with no actor ever standing, was reportedly an inspiration for Cube's confined, single-set approach.
