Cube Zero is the third installment of the Cube films. Unlike the first two, which centers the story on the individuals inside the maze, it is centered on two men (Eric, and Dodd) who are in a control room and monitoring people inside the maze. They seemingly work for the military and are sent dossiers of criminals who are sent through the maze. They record the criminals, and if the criminal dies, they put a disc with the recording into the participant’s file, and wait for orders for another. They don’t know why they are doing this and are basically on a “need to know” basis. And they do not need to know. Dodd seems to be the “Average Joe” type, and Eric is a very smart individual who can memorize an entire chess game and beats Dodd handily at this on a regular basis due to this gift.
They see a woman who is put into the maze, and in her file, it notes that she is a politician. Eric notices that she doesn’t have a consent form in the file which is usually present for people who are sent into the Cube. While one of them wants to save her, Dodd is worried about their bosses and the consequences of prying. Two others from their operations room had already disappeared, and they know the same could happen to them. The woman meets up with some people who are already in the maze, and together they find that there are letters on the inside of the doorways, which are a sequence or code to indicate where they are in the maze, but that doesn’t mean that they are safe.
If you are familiar with the previous Cube films, you know that this cube maze is full of booby traps. All of the rooms in the cube look exactly the same with an entrance/exit on all four walls, floor, and ceiling. You can travel freely through the rooms, but some of the rooms have traps that will kill you. It could be fire, electricity, acid, poison, or pretty much anything else you can think of. Like the previous films, it shows some pretty cool kills for people unfortunate enough to enter one of the trap rooms.
After convincing Dodd that they need to call upstairs to alert their superiors that there is someone in the maze without a consent form, Eric realizes that he is going to have to take action into his own hands and goes into the maze.
Now, up until this point, the writing was actually pretty decent. This idea that a couple of people were running this operation with some mysterious bosses directing them to do so reminds me a lot of Lost and the mysterious button sequence that had to be pressed with no clear explanation. Or even something similar to Saw, where Jigsaw sets up these elaborate traps and watches people. Cube definitely needed a bit more story, and this did a pretty good job up until this point. But much like Lost, things start to get a bit wonky.
Right after Eric goes into the elevator and heads down to the maze, Some eccentric weird-looking guy with a cybernetic eye in a suit and two lackeys show up and decide they are going to run the show. They do some weird stuff and the old 1990s computer keyboards flip over and turn into these weird Matrix touchscreen things. Eric somehow finds the group and they navigate through the maze, and they try to escape together.
To summarize, this was a definite improvement over part 2, and actually explains something from the first film, which was a nice throwback and ties them together. While part 2 didn’t really offer much that was refreshing, it was nice to see the new perspective and continuity. We believe we may have said it before, but if there was a franchise reboot that could really benefit from today’s technology in terms of CGI for a sci-fi horror film, it would be this one. There is so much they could do with it, and we really hope they make a new one. As for this one, we would say it’s about average but worth a watch if you are a fan of the others.
