Cube Zero (2004)

(On Cable TV, May 2017) I would have paid good money for an explicative sequel to Cube when I first saw it in theatres in 1997. The low-budget aesthetics of the movie conjured a much bigger mystery rife for exploration in a better-budgeted sequel. But then we got our wishes: Cube 2: Hypercube glossily repeated the same material a bit more satisfyingly without offering many more explanations, whereas Cube Zero goes industrial in presenting a prequel with a view of the cube from the outside. Unfortunately, the answers are far less interesting than the mystery: by the time we’re served with a religious dictatorship as “explanation”, the air has gone out of the premise and we’re stuck with low-imagination ramblings that don’t even make sense. It doesn’t help that the tone is just as dour as the rest of the series: the deaths are gory, everybody dies, everything falls apart and answers are strongly discouraged. I saw the movie out of a sense of series completion (not that they’re consistent with each other), but I’m not exactly itching to re-watch any or all of them.