Will we ever get a worthy reboot? possibly even a continuation of the 'canon' , what ever that is

Will we ever get a worthy reboot? possibly even a continuation of the 'canon' , what ever that is.

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this fucking film ruined me when i was younger, i couldnt get to sleep for months i became so claustrophobic

variety.com/2015/film/news/cube-remake-lionsgate-1201485120/

This fucking movie

Why would you want that? All three films in the "canon" is all you really need.

first, a bump to keep the thread alive. Next, I will reiterate some observations that I've made about the movie.

My first observation (I've made it before), is that Cube is very similar to Alien, in many ways:

Alien was released in 1979, while Cube was released in 1997. The two years are not only both anagrams of each other, but further, both numbers are prime. Prime numbers are an important plot element in Cube.

Both films feature a similarly demogragic'd principal cast of seven, shut in with each other in a large structure, and forced to co-operate (they're not friends, they just happen to have been thrust in the same shit together) in an effort to escape the (titular) immediate threat. The real, underlying source of their misery, however, is a faceless Company, which is ultimately responsible for them being in this mess.

Both films feature a cast-of-seven that can be broken down as follows, two white women, four white guys, one black guy:

An intelligent and fairly competent, but not perfect, young woman. As the movie goes on, she seems to emerge as the lead.

An emotional, useless woman.

A man who dies in an exceptionally gruesome and memorable fashion, whose death serves as the first big illustration of what the "antagonist" is capable of.

An old, grizzled man with a dry sense of humor and a little know-how - he is the second to die.

A cold, aloof, and unliked white guy, who later turns out to have inside info on what's going on, which just causes the group to hate him even more

Another white guy (in one version, the captain - in another, a retard).

A big dumb masculine black guy.

thanks /x/

my next (repeated) observation is a little comment on the math of the traps. Every room is equipped with three-three-digit numbers (at its ports of entry), for example:

100 023 142

It is essential to know which rooms have traps, and which don't. It is quickly worked out that if any one of the three three-digit numbers of a room is itself a prime number, then the room contains a lethal trap of some kind. For example, in the above, since 23 (or, 023) is a prime number, than that room contains a trap. And this holds good, one hundred percent of the time: if there's a prime number among the three numbers, then sure enough, there is a trap. Naturally, it so happens that math student Leaven is quite good at figuring primes in her head. And so the group make some headway.

But eventually, a room is encountered with coordinates something like this...

102 004 600

And despite none of the three numbers being a prime, the room still contains a trap, which is narrowly avoided. Oh no, the system is failing... or is it? Notice first of all that such a room being trapped doesn't mean that the above is invalid. Sure enough, every room with a prime still does have a trap. It just means that there exist other rooms, apart from prime-marked rooms, that happen to also have traps. The point being that Leaven's hypothesis wasn't incorrect, just incomplete. But obviously this is cold comfort to a group who have to risk their own skins on every single room.

Later, the breakthrough for complete information on how to tell whether or not a room is trapped, or not, with no cases unaccounted for: if any of the three three-digit numbers is a / (natural-number) power of a prime/, and not merely a prime itself (all prime numbers are also trivially powers of primes insofar as they are themselves raised to the power of one), then the room is trapped. If not, then the room is not trapped. For example, in the above, 4 = 2^2, where 2 is a prime. 4 is a power of a prime. Thus, trap.

The first one is the only one worth anything

Cube 2 is up its own ass and focuses too much on psyche over problem solving which is what made the first one great

Cube 3 actually started explaining shit and jumped the shark with that fucking wacky character with the bionic eye


Making a "lore"/universe behind Cube is stupid and defeats the point. Really doesn't matter what it is.

This breakthrough that /powers of primes/ (that is, especially powers greater than one, where a power of one simply indicates the primes themselves) also indicate traps, comes very late in the movie. The group are extremely stressed, dehydrated, and Leaven angrily insists that computing such numbers is not feasible. Enter idiot savant Kazan, with his talent: he can factorize numbers to give the requisite information concerning these powers of primes.

This leads me to my armchair observation about the math of the movie, as it had been explained up until this point. First, I wish to stress that that the group are under extreme stress, and burnout is obviously a legit possibility. This would readily explain Leaven's frustration. But on the one hand, I just want to leave this plot element aside, and look at how easy/hard the math (arithmetic) actually is.

But once a person has has the opportunity to think about it for a few minutes, not only is it quite feasible, indeed /easy/ to compute the required powers of primes, but more than this, /it's even easier than testing for primality, which Leavan had been doing all along. My point being that once one actually thinks about it, it's absurd for Leaven to be able to do the harder thing, and not the easier thing - she has enough training to know how to do either one, and is clearly not thinking straight when she proclaims the task to be "astronomical". This is again easily explained by the stress and burnout of the characters, but the fact remains that the one arithmetic task is easier than the other, so it doesn't quite "wash" in the movie.

Expanding: Only the numbers from 1-999 ever need to be considered - despite the three three-digit number format, we never consider millions, or even thousands, for the purposes of trap testing - each number is always considered separately. Leaven can readily tell whether any number from 1 through 999 is prime or not - this is clearly established.

cont.

Incidentally, the number of prime numbers from 1 through 999, inclusive, is exactly 168, or about seventeen percent. Apart from 2, every such number ends in a digit of 1,3, 7 or 9. So any time you see

100 267 200

That's your yellow-flag to get cracking, just by that one ending 7 alone.

The above number of 168 is expressed by the prime counting function π(n), which simply counts the number of prime numbers less than or equal to some given natural number. Obviously this doesn't do Leaven much good (and the use of pi here has nothing to do with its context in circles), but it is worth nothing that the above amounts to saying that π(999) = 168, with 2 being the first prime,and 997 being the 168th.

So, powers of primes. Raising prime numbers to some natural power greater than 1 (2, 3, 4...). But every such number must be less than 999, by the number scheme! This greatly simplifies the task, and perhaps this is a detail that short-circuited in Leaven's tired brain at the time. Anyway, the problem is: since we know from the above how many relevant primes there are (168), the next question is: how many relevant (greather-than-one) powers of primes are there?

We can very, very easily put an immediate bound on this: The largest prime that can be squared, yet remains less than 1000, is 31 (which is slightly less than 1000's square root, of course). Squaring 37 (the next prime), or indeed raising any equal or higher prime to any equal or higher power, clearly goes beyond 1000 and so need not be considered. The problem then reduces to raising every prime from 2-31 inclusive to various powers, and never going beyond 999, and counting up how many instances there are. Further, there should only be a couple dozen at most, since we can also come at the thing from the other direction, take the smallest prime to the power of 9 (2^9 =512) and immediately reason that no exponent greater than 9 will ever be used.

The relevant set of information ends up looking like this. Put another way, there are exactly 25 natural powers of primes, where the power is greater than one, such that the value is less than 1000. 168 + 25 = 193 numbers, or about 20% of numbers from 1-999 inclusive, which indicate the presence of a trap.

Notice what a much /smaller/ set of information this is, and how easily it is generated, relative to primality testing, which is what Leaven had been doing all along.

Go on, I am listening.

IIRC, there is a shot in one of the films showing the dimensions of the entire cube of cubes. Does anyone remember the dimensions? 8x8x8? 10x10x10?

I've effectively completed my thoughts (again) by this point:

In the movie Cube,

1) trapped rooms are indicated either by three-digit prime numbers (of which there are exactly 168), or otherwise by positive-integer, greater-than-one powers of primes, such as 2^2 = 4, or 31^2 = 961, which are yet less than 1000, of which there are exactly 25. Thus, the number of three-digit numbers which may indicate a trapped room is 193, of which exactly 168 are prime, and the other 25 are /composite/ (the fancy word for not-prime themselves, despite being powers of primes).

2) It is easier to determine whether a given number is one of the above 25 powers of primes, than to determine whether a given number is a prime. This requires a rested head and a little reasoning, however, which Leaven probably could have done easily had she been back home in about ten minutes, if asked. But this reasoning is easier than cranking every number from 1-999 for primality.

3) Leaven is supposed to be able to crank every number from 1-999 for primality in her head, even under duress.

4) The protagonists of Cube were under extreme stress and had no nourishment, which can easily explain their frustration at discerning the other powers-of-primes case. Still, leaving this legitimate explanation aside, my basic observation is that the stress notwithstanding, it is much easier to crank powers-of primes up through 999, than to crank whether numbers themselves are prime. My larger point then is that it is slightly silly how the movie's writing works, about this detail. But it is easily explained away, as I admit.

I dunno Hypercube kinda ruined it for me. Zero had some creepy stuff but the dude with the goofy robot eye killed it for me.

surprised they haven't tried already. would probably be cheap, just need one set

The issue would be thinking of new traps that work in that 1 set.

I don't recall anything like this*. The math side is the most developed in the original, while the first sequel (the worst of the bunch) just throws out a bunch of popsci memes and doesn't bother very hard about describing an inner logic of its puzzle.

*It is worked out in the original that the structure is 26^3, or 17,576 rooms, but although the "edge" of the structure does give some sense of scale once it is seen, we never actually count off from spot to spot.

the base unit of 26 is slightly interesting in that there are 26 letters in the English alphabet, so it might also be easy to put some lettering scheme on the thing. I'm also reaching pretty hard now (someone called me /x/ earlier), but meh: a tarot deck (Leaven even mentions tarot cards in reference to divining her numbers, but with opposite intent: "they're not tarot cards") contains exactly 78 cards, or 3 x 26, a familiar factorization to the above.

I see.

Building on this, I watched the sequels on yt one time just to sate my curiosity, and I was mostly disappointed, but I went in with zero expectations so there you go. original is best.

That said, I like how the third movie develops the bureaucrats in the basement a bit, and also there's a very nice, cartoony nyeah-hah-hah Snidely Whiplash villain-turn by an actor, he did a good job. Third movie is more fun than the second, and does away with the boring set and stupid 90's TV characters of the second movie in favor of more engaging, campy 90s TV characters.

i bet the Saw guys could come up with some stuff

t. Kazan

Ugh, Saw. I've since seen Salo and Cannibal Holocaust, and derived enjoyment from them. I had my fill of Saw.

I watched the third one and the black guy was getting his body twisted radially and there were like hogs and shit and I was like what am I even doing with my life I don't need this shit. I never watched another one. The needle-bed in the second one was good squicky stuff though, I'll admit. A few years later, some kids tried buying a SAW III DVD in my checkout lane and I went lol nope I like horror movies guys but you ain't getting this one.

....t-two.
...Trap!
as-tro...NOMICAAAL
GUMDROP

Bravo

Is that a Let it Die reference?

I dont think then need to reboot it. They dont really need to explan anything either. Another movie with some cool creepy twists and turns without being gore porn could be fun.

26x26x26

i can't imagine being thrown into this. that must suck