Hacker Cinema
Cube
1997 · Film · 90 min
Directed by Vincenzo Natali
ThrillerScience FictionMystery
A group of strangers find themselves trapped in a maze-like prison. It soon becomes clear that each of them possesses the peculiar skills necessary to escape, if they don't wind up dead first.
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53 comments on Hacker News
I think I've only seen the first Cube movie and enjoyed it. Fermat's Room is a similar type of escape room film which might appeal though I don't think it's a great film (I did enjoy it though).
I first watched Alice In Borderland when the first two seasons came out, but then when I heard that they were releasing a third season, I rewatched the first two seasons again as it had been a couple of years. I probably enjoyed it more the second time of watching, though the third season was a bit meh. I since started reading the manga which features some different games (and vice versa).
I think what elevates Alice in Borderland over Squid Game is the character development. My favourite character has to be Chishiya as he calmly watches and evaluates each situation and just aura farms whilst others panic (sometimes known as the Unbothered King).
Finished the first 2 episodes. Quite entertaining, thanks again for the suggestion.
Reminds me of the 3 Cube movies about people stuck in a deadly puzzle. I don't remember them so well (or at all) so I might as well rewatch them at some point lol. There's even a new one from 2021 that I didn't know about.
And they aren’t being objective and rational about the polls, they are funding and cherry-picking poll data that tells them to do what they want to do.
There’s no principle, no strategy, no goal. We’re living in the political version of Cube, and just like the movie: it’s a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan.
There’s literally hundreds of shows and movies.
What some people have missed is that this is its own sub-genre of horror.
You have shows like Alice in Borderland that doesn’t get nearly enough love (and is far better than Squid Games in my opinion).
Cube is a late 90s movie that’s on this theme too. You could argue the SAW movies are too, though I’m not personally a fan of those.
There are also plenty of comics on this theme too. The aforementioned Alice in Borderlands is based on a manga by the same title.
It's a nice list. I've only seen a few of the movies on there. Offhand, that includes "Hotel Artemis", "Vision Quest", "Moon", "Automata", "It Follows", "Omega Doom", "Predestination", "Cube", and "Freejack". But quite a few more look very interesting and will be going on my personal "to watch" list. Thanks for sharing!
When I see the eye-watering amounts of money that sovereign wealth funds are willing to pay for talent, I get very concerned for our countries national security. They regularly throw out 7 figures for the right folks.
All you have to do is starting reading about DarkMatter or G42 group. Somehow, working in AI on training new LLMs can put you into a direct line to the guys who murdered Khashoggi
I think back to that movie "Cube" and the philosophical discussion they have about the creators of the system that they're in. They end up agreeing that the individual cubes were built for possible benign or even good reasons, but in their combining together does it turn into a "torture" chamber. That individual good intentions can be subverted at scale to have "tyranny" without the mitigating factor of the tramua that it normally induces is scary indeed.
If the movie "the Cube" has taught us anything (and I guess it hasn't) it is that it's possible work on something without knowing what it's actually for. With some misdirection, an AI could probably run in a data center that is on paper doing something completely different. Do most people maintaining cloud servers today even know what they are running?
In Cube (1997) the characters are trapped in a labyrinth of sorts made of boxes (cubes) that they can escape by solving math riddles.
They're all supposed to be math geniuses, but very early on in the movie they take forever to decide if 645 or 372 are prime numbers... It kind of killed the suspension of disbelief for me right there...
Even if we knew it was, would anything change? People have built their careers on this stuff. Ten or twenty years ago I laughed at some things that are now just mainstream and normal - people do this stuff, they hire other people who do this stuff, one day you wake up and it's industry best practice and you have to fall in line.
When I first watched the movie Cube I thought the idea that people would build a deathtrap and then put people in it because they thought the incomprehensible bureaucracy they worked for wanted that was ludicrous. Now I realise that's the real horror of the film.
>Soon it's going to get real, and we'll end up in Cube.
If you don't know what they mean by that, this speech[0] from the movie might help explain.
Chilling and prescient, but then again these trends have been building for a long time.
[0] (spoilers obviously) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boDgkH7Yw-0
Clerks and Cube are other movies where this happens.
Didn't know there were sequels. Don't think I'd want to watch them though. I'm sure they feel the need to explain things, and the good thing about the cube is that it's never explained.
Rant. Why do films insist on explaining things that don't need to be explained. Shutter Island would have been a better film without the last 5 minutes answering the question as to whether he's insane. Even blade runner, why does deckard have to be human, it's much more interesting when the question is open. Same for the sequel.
The movie Cube is an exploration of your black box concept.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/
When I was a kid, I thought IKEA product codes (eg: 002.638.50) were coordinates in 3D space of where the item was stored in a giant IKEA warehouse (like in the film Cube, but less deadly).
I'd like to know the reasoning behind it though. Parts of a same product usually have very different numbers.
The answer is always that someone's just working for hire. Even repressive regimes are made up of 99% of people just doing their jobs to get their paycheck, looking the other way, or down. A great movie is "Cube".
I get anxiety from looking at it. Similar to the movies “the cube”
Nature: living every day like you're in a slasher horror movie. Really, really bad. It only seems fun and wholesome to us because we're on top and almost none of us spend much time genuinely engaging with nature in even the way that an apex predator has to, let alone prey animals. And jeez, why would we? It's terrible.
Factory farm: living every day (and probably not very many of them) like you're in Saw or Cube or something. Far worse than even the pretty bad situation that is life in nature. Like, a lot worse. And that was already pretty bad.
Ethical farms, keeping backyard chickens, et c: Like living in a relatively good dystopia. Brave New World, maybe, in the best case. Logan's Run, in the worst.
There is this movie called 'Cube' that deals with this problem.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/
The short version is that a bunch of tech people are asked to design all kinds of man-traps, the buyer then combines the various traps in a shifting maze and the techies are kidnapped and dumped in the maze trying to survive their own creations.
I think the film "Cube" is superior in this context, is about exactly your point: [SPOILER ALERT]
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:
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Blind bureaucracy creating a city-cized torture device over the course of decades, everyone built a little piece of it, but no one knows what it is.
True. Maybe everyone is just playing along.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_(film)
This is why I wonder if humans are actually intelligent or just clever. Seems to me that a true intelligence would learn to command its own game theoretic / emergent context, not be dragged along by it to wherever the magic bus is going.
The movie The Cube springs to mind. No one knows what anyone else is building other than a very few who put the whole dastardly thing together.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_(film)
well there's this great quote from the movie "Cube" (1997):
There is no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan.
The most unassuming movie I was recommended, but turned out to be spectacular: Upgrade. I read somewhere the producers had really low expectations for this movie as it is low budget and not about comic book superheroes. Apparently, there are no plans for the 2nd installment. But, imho, creative camerawork, beautiful cinematography and wild choreography put it anywhere above and beyond most any superhero flick out now.
The movie that shattered any expectations I had for it: Enter Nowhere. I stumbled upon it on Amazon Prime, thought the synopsis was somewhat interesting and went into watching it with extremely low expectations (the title is crap, the poster is crap, it has Clint Eastwood's son with wooden expression throughout the movie). But this movie turned out to be a trippy puzzle unlike what we are used to (Cube, Saw, Escape Room). Instead of wealthy people with kinky(?) sense of entertainment and insane philosophers, it has something to do with WW2. Unusual.
Low budget movie that takes place in a single room, yet won't bore you even for a second: Circle. It's a survival game movie where predicting the outcome of the game is half the fun. Blew all my expectations out the park. I watched a lot of survival movies of late and this is one of the (very few) best.
The movies that deserved all their hype: Arrival, It, Us, Annihilation. In Arrival I loved the design of aliens, their environment, the way the linguist tries to decipher their language and the final twist. One negative is how the movie deals with geopolitics - it's crude and laughable. For a movie led by kids, It (the movie) is really a solid one. It is polished like a huge budget superhero flick, but also, uh, literate and entertaining. Us is a beautiful, very slick movie that pops in your face. It has a couple of interesting twists and some funny bits. Refreshing break from the regular Hollywood fare(schlock). That said, Us is riddled with holes as if someone shot at it from a semi. But even with that it's fun to watch as Hollywood doesn't make movies like Us often (only on special occasions?). Annihilation is gorgeous. Period. The set design is a work of art and I love the subject matter. Again, H'wood doesn't dabble in this sort of stuff very often. The move signals the ending twist half-way through, but I am not sure it's even a twist. This movie doesn't end with a bang as it's all about the process. To me it is a meditation on research, often frustrating and unsuccessful (though, the linguist in Arrival was very much successful in her endeavor :) The soundtrack is unusual (and beautiful) for this kind of movie (although the movie itself is unusual). I love the sound design in all these four movies. Really attractive.
Among the memorable shorts (I watch a lot of them; I can recall many, but can't remember their titles) I saw are The Gun Fighter [0], Paradox (try solving the problem in the movie before it ends)[1], Thresher [2], Rakka [3].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWs4WA--eKU
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnfh3qcpBxA
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqNdbHHWtBc
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjQ2t_yNHQs
> Kind of like reading the paperwork and after-mission reports of SHIELD.
A comparison to SHIELD would be misleading, I think, in that it would suggest an aesthetic/ideology of "heroism" behind the work that's not there. SCP paints a picture of a cynical and dystopian organization, with little concern for loss-of-life of its test subjects.
I would compare SCP more to the Half-Life universe's Black Mesa and Aperture Science research facilities. Or to the Cube movies. Or, I suppose, to The Syndicate from the X-Files (though in that case the comparison would be to the parts of the military doing security and ops under them.)
Cube wasn’t a shitty film, though. It was clever, and had a strong meaning, and was made on a shoestring budget.
I think part of the problem for “elevated”, “art house”, etc horror films is that the majority of “horror” films these days are more torture porn than drama/plot, and more “jump scare” than tension.
I feel like the original “cube” ushered in the realization that you could make a “popular” movie that was not a block buster actually be profitable if you kept the costs close to zero. So we get movies that don’t require well known actors (the star is the fx) with few sets (cube essentially had two).
I thought I had a point but now I don’t know what it was, so I’ll leave this comment half way done, just like my old high school essays :)
Reminded me of this quote from the movie Cube:
It's all the same machine, right? The Pentagon, multinational corporations, the police. If you do one little job, you build a widget in Saskatoon, and the next thing you know, it's two miles under the desert, the essential component of a death machine.
That could have been straight from the movie 'the Cube'.
I have to second this. I used to watch some really "mindfucked" movies on Netflix. I think I watched The Cube, The Zero Theorem, and Brazil, partly because Netflix had recommended them to me. Now? Those movies don't even show up in the entire recommendation list. In fact, most of what shows up is series I know I won't like. I still subscribe but it's a letdown how the recommendation system incentives have changed.
Not exactly what you are looking for, but in the movie Cube (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/) a giant machine is built to kill people. IIRC, there was no real purpose behind the machine, it was kind of just built by bureaucratic accident.
This reminds me of the movie "Cube", which is about a sadistic torture chamber built by accident through a network of government sub-contractors who each built some innocuous part of the thing, which was then assembled through layers of opaque bureaucracy. It's a terrible film, but I always thought that premise was hilarious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_(film)
Looks to me like a constantly evolving maze. A shifting maze? Anyone watch the movie Cube (Cube is a 1997 Canadian science fiction psychological horror film, directed and co-written by Vincenzo Natali)?
This looks like a version of Cube, only in 2D.
> In fact, I didn't know much about Tor until researching DARPA and the other participants involved in the program.
This reminds me of the movie Cube :(.
mainstream: American beauty, Pulp fiction, No country for old men, American History X, Saving Private Ryan, Taken, The pianist
classics: Lawrence of Arabia, The Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terminator I & II
hipster: Knife in the water (Polanski), Come and See (Idi i smotri - best war movie I've seen), Haute Tension (french horror movie), Requiem for a Dream, Trainspotting, City of God, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Goodbye Lenin, The cube
I've created a few Chrome extensions, and I constantly get bombarded with aggressive emails practically demanding that I accept financial compensation in exchange for adding whatever sketchy javascript snippet they want me to add. Some even have the nerve to follow up as if they are offended by my silence when I don't respond to them. I'm not sure how those people even got their hands on my email address.
What infuriates me is that even extensions that are widely known to have succumbed to these sinister offers to include borderline malware in their extension, such as Hover Zoom, are not punished in the slightest even after being caught, or even required to remove the malicious javascript snippet.
What the hell is the point of all these XSS prevention measures in modern browsers, such as reflected XSS prevention, CSP, script nonces, etc. when all you have to do to bypass all of them is make your own browser extension? Is the team at Google that handles Chrome extensions completely unable to communicate with the team that handles browser security? The left hand has forgotten that the right hand even exists. I nominate Google as the company that the movie The Cube was warning us about.
If the suspiciously nameless author of this article wasn't paid by Google to write it, then he ripped himself off. If the author had performed the most basic research into the topic he was writing about, he would have learned that Firefox's approach to extensions is perfect and is the only reasonable solution to the security problems that exist with Chrome's extensions. An actual journalist writing about this topic would have swiftly concluded that Google should be lambasted for its blunders and mocked for not living up to Firefox's standards, rather than being borderline worshipped for barely doing anything to fix a horrific problem they openly invited in the first place.
I understood (arguably too much) The Cube as an allegory for the intelligence machine we have built/are building. That was a really hard realization.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/
I really liked all of them, but episode 2 was probably my favourite of season 1. It is over the top compared to other parts of the series, but not compared to other experimental far future or alternate universe scifi. For example: Dark City, Idiocracy, Cube, Moon, Battle Royale, Maze Runner.
Try looking at the prelinger archive, which is now hosted on archive.org. Pay attention to the copyright situation, though -- which differs heavily between countries.
There are a lot of notable films that are in the public domain in the united states because of some changes to copyright law in the US that occurred in the late 50s and early 60s -- Night of the Living Dead, the original Jim Henson version of Cube, Fritz Lang's Metropolis. But, those films are not necessarily out of copyright elsewhere (and some countries, such as Germany, have no concept of a public domain -- all works belong to the estate of their creators in perpetuity).
Anyone remember that quote from The Cube?
There is no conspiracy Nobody is in charge It's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan.
It's only half wrong ;-)
(It's been a while since I've seen that film so I forgot, but they apparently talk a lot more about this topic, about half the quotes on this page: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cube_%28film%29 )
This premise reminds me of the plot of a movie, I think it was The Cube. From what I remember, it dealt with how bureaucracy could be used to perpetuate evil, without those involved thinking that what they're doing is wrong.
Once the machinery is in place, inertia makes it very hard to stop: the cogs don't need to worry about the bigger picture, they can just keep on turning.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/
Yes people are evil and these people manifest themselves in the form of corporations, governments and agencies. There is the second system effect as well where one of the mechanisms above manifests itself as something evil when the components are thoroughly innocent. An example of the latter is your typical defence contractor. Also reference the film "The Cube" which discusses this as part of the theme.
People are definitely evil when they shrug off the moral implications of what they're doing for a pile of cash or turn a blind eye to the consequences of doing something. There are a lot of evil people on here and each little action adds a paper cut to society.
There's probably better ones avaliable now on github, but this one caught my eye.
I was wondering, are there any examples of mazes (real or programs) where the structure, rules or walls change based on a certain algorithmic pattern?
So that you've not only got to find the right way out, but you must crack the code before a way out is even possible.
Kind of like the movie Cube: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/
These quotes are from the 1997 film Cube [1], not the 1969 The Cube [2] of your rotten tomatoes link.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_(film)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cube_(film)
This kind of discussion always reminds me of the movie Cube[1]. Since watching it years ago, I have often found it to be a fantastical and exaggerated but useful metaphor related to this topic.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_(film)
This makes me think of the movie Cube. Wrong or evil? It's irrelevant - the outcomes are perverse.
The title made me think of some scenario from the movie "Cube"
I didn't like Cube very much. The acting was bad, the premise was a bit silly... but still, it had something which made it interesting.
And it was the guys first movie, on a tiny budget.
I haven't seen Splice yet, but have heard mostly good things about it. So don't write off the guy just because of Cube.
Curious that the article states both "Vincenzo Natali will direct the film" and "Visual-effects work already has begun."
Don't mean to be pedantic, but it implies art direction has commenced prior to the director actually starting, which surely must be inaccurate. (Enjoyed Natali's Cube.)
I don't see what the problem is... I thought everyone was in favour of launching with a minimal viable product these days.
But seriously, maybe the thing was cobbled together from a whole bunch of government workers/contractors who didn't really know what they were building. Sort of like that film, Cube. Hence the lack of finesse.
Or, maybe they wanted it to be analysed so other factions would be less wary of it. I mean, who knows.
I discovered this through a fantastic list of 'mindfuck movies':
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/reviews/mindfuck_movies.php
It's definitely the most complex of the bunch, but most of them were great finds. Cube was another low-budget gem, and on the other end of the spectrum there's The Game with Michael Douglas.
It is interesting that people would accept such working conditions voluntarily.
Reminds me of the movie 'the cube'.
Not all are hacker movies per se, but these have great general geek appeal:
Existenz http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/
Cube http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/
The Nines http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0810988/
The World's Fastest Indian http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0412080/
October Sky http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0132477/
Three Days of the Condor http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0073802/
The first thing that came to mind when I read the title were the movies Cube and Hyper Cube.