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Cube 2: Hypercube
Film poster
Directed by	Andrzej Sekuła
Produced by	Ernie Barbarash Peter Block Suzanne Colvin
Written by	Sean Hood
Starring	Kari Matchett Geraint Wyn Davies Grace Lynn Kung Matthew Ferguson Neil Crone
Music by	Norman Orenstein
Cinematography	Andrzej Sekuła
Editing by	Mark Sanders
Distributed by	Lions Gate Entertainment
Release date(s)	April 15, 2003 (USA)
Running time	95 min.
Country	Canada
Language	English
Preceded by	Cube
Followed by	Cube Zero

Cube 2: Hypercube is the sequel of the science fiction/horror film Cube. Released in 2002, Hypercube had a bigger budget than its predecessor, and a new director, Andrzej Sekuła. The industrial-style rooms of the first film are replaced with high-tech, brightly-lit chambers; instead of traps like flamethrowers and extending spikes, the rooms themselves are the danger as they distort time and move through each other.

[edit] Plot

The film starts with a shot of several people lying on surgical gurneys wrapped in plastic. It then cuts to what appears to be a series of flashbacks of medical rooms. The next shot shows a woman waking up alone in a cube, with a small black square on the center of each side. She calls for help and her company ID reveals that her name is Rebecca and she works for IZON. She approaches one of the black squares, which opens when she touches it. She looks through the opening and is yanked by an unseen force into the next room. We then see a man in a similar room with a briefcase handcuffed to his arm. He opens his briefcase, but finds it to be empty. In another room, a woman enters to find an unconscious man and attempts to take his pulse. He grabs her by the throat and brandishes a knife. He eventually releases after questioning her. Suddenly another door opens, and a boy looks through. They call to him, but he pulls back and the door closes. Door after door surrounding the white room opens, with the same boy looking through. The woman pursues him through the last door he opened despite the man's protests, but finds only an empty room. When she attempts to go back through the same door to the man, he is no longer there.

The woman opens another door and finds a frightened blind teenager named Sasha. The woman reveals her name is Kate while trying to comfort the girl. Another door opens and a man stumbles in. He introduces himself as Jerry Whitehall, then explains that he has wandered for hours, marking each room with a number. He scratches a number 4 into the metal of one of the doors with the wristband of his metal watch. They open another door, and find a handcuffed man hung by his belt. The boy from earlier is trying to hold the man up. Jerry rushes to help while Kate helps Sasha climb into the room. The man with the knife suddenly enters from another door and is quickly recruited. Through their combined efforts, they free the man, who slumps unconscious to the floor. The boy's name is revealed to be Max Reisler. Max goes through the unconscious man's pockets and discovers he is Colonel Thomas McGuire, who works for the Pentagon. The man with the knife gives his name as Simon. An elderly woman in a sweatsuit suddenly enters from another room, asking if anyone has seen the shower room. She is Mrs. Paley, a senile woman who believes she is lost in a gym. The colonel wakes and Simon asks him about how to exit the rooms. The colonel says they have to solve for the code to leave. They are interrupted by one of the walls suddenly vibrating and Sasha's panicked warning that "something horrible" is coming for them. The party watches the wall in disbelief as a ghosted version of the wall begins to move towards them. They quickly move into the next room. The colonel handcuffs himself to one of the nearby rungs on the wall. Kate pleads for the key to free him, but the colonel swallows it. Simon yells for Kate to come and she barely makes it into the next room. The colonel is burnt to ash.

Mrs. Paley notices a gray design in the metal of the walls and exclaims that it is a "beautiful tesseract." Jerry confirms her sighting and explains that a tesseract is an example of the 4th dimension. They then share their last memory before waking in the room. Jerry reveals he designed the doors in the cubes. Kate is a psychotherapist who last remembers leaving her hospital at night. Mrs. Paley says the last thing she remembers is walking her dog. They eventually realize they are in a tesseract, with varying times and space. Jerry then notices the number 60659 written near the door. This number appears in many different places throughout the movie. Jerry opens a door to find a woman named Julia Sewell sleeping. They then discover the direction of gravity can change in some of the rooms. In the next room, they come across a dead man with complicated mathematical equations written across his body and on the walls. Meanwhile, Mrs. Paley is searching for her dog "Izon" - several members of the group find this odd, as Izon is the name of a large weapons manufacturer. They ask Mrs. Paley what she did for a living, and she mentions being a theoretical mathematician at Izon Research Affiliates. Max reveals that Alex Trusk is a mysterious hacker and may be responsible for the creation of the Cube. While searching, she opens a door in the floor where she sees herself in an alternate reality being murdered by an alternate Simon. He is then decapitated by a trap after warning the group not to trust Mrs. Paley. This scene shocks the group, but enables Jerry to explain the possibility of parallel alternate dimensions crossing over. Max and Julia insist that what they witnessed was instead an optical illusion. The group of seven attempts to escape the Cube, but after endless crossings and a montage concerning Alex Trusk and the nature of the Cube itself, they are no nearer to solving its mysteries.

While the others are sleeping, Simon reveals to Jerry that he is a private investigator. Simon tells him that the people who kidnapped them emptied all of his pockets with the sole exception of two items: his knife and a picture of the person he's looking for: Rebbecca "Becky" Young. He begins theorizing that perhaps it is a message or possibly a warning. Sasha's acute hearing soon awakens her, and she tells Kate she hears "something wrong." Kate wakes the group, and they spot a floating square in the middle of the room as it slowly expands to form a cube, then a tesseract. Mrs. Paley extends her hand to touch it. Jerry, sensing danger, lunges forward, telling her to keep her hand back. Unknown to them, the "floating cube" is in fact a floating tesseract of blades that is attracted to movement, and promptly slices Jerry's back. Kate, Simon, Max, Julia and Mrs. Paley manage to escape to another room as the tesseract continues to grow. Jerry's writhing eventually attracts the blades and he is slashed into pieces. Kate realizes Sasha is still trapped in the room and returns to save her. Sasha and Kate freeze and the tesseract slowly shrinks and finally disappears due to a lack of movement. While the pair is safe, they are separated from the group.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Paley is bound and gagged by Simon, who is convinced that she is putting on an act as a senile old woman, and is in fact behind the creation of the Cube. Their confrontation is cut short by crystalline columns protruding from the walls, similar to the "ghost wall" of the room where Thomas died. Simon briefly tries to save Mrs. Paley but soon decides to kill her instead; he stabs her, leaving her to die as he makes his escape. Appalled by Simon's murder, Max and Julia quickly flee to other rooms to distance themselves from Simon. Max and Julia soon stop running and it is then revealed that they are both linked to Izon. In a moment of heated passion, Julia kisses Max. Unbeknown to them, they are in a room where time passes quickly, and they age prematurely and soon die while having sex. Meanwhile, Simon succumbs to stress and goes insane. He meets Jerry from an alternate reality, and proceeds to kill him through shock and near-starvation, shortly followed by a similar encounter with Rebecca. It is then implied that Simon cannibalizes multiple alternate realities of Jerry and Rebecca to stay alive. Kate begins to encounter rooms containing grisly scenes from the past, shaking her confidence and causing her mental fatigue. Meanwhile, endless escape attempts have taken their toll on Sasha, who gives up hope. She also reveals that she is in fact Alex Trusk, who was mostly responsible for the creation of the hypercube and knows that there is only a matter of time before reality collapses in on itself and the Cube implodes. Kate, however, still searches for a way out, but each door she opens reveals a disturbing scene from the past. She then finds Simon, but grabs his knife and stabs him in the eye. She turns around only to realize that Simon, now aged and blind in the left eye, is holding Sasha hostage. He kills Sasha and moves towards Kate, who escapes through a door that leads to the opposite end of the same room (revealing that the cube is shrinking). Simon is taken aback, and Kate pounces on him. She manages to use his own knife to kill him.

Kate notes the time on Simon's watch and, based on the recurring number "60659" found throughout the Cube and Sasha's theory of the Cube's impending implosion, finally deduces that the Cube will implode at 6:06:59. Just as everything around her falls apart, Kate grabs Sasha's necklace and opens the door in the floor, revealing a black void. She jumps in as the Cube implodes. She awakens in a glimmering pool and is escorted to Izon authorities. It is implied that Kate's job was to locate Alex and retrieve the information she stole from Izon. Handing over Sasha/Alex's necklace, which contains the stolen information, Kate is then executed with a single shot to the head. The film ends with the Izon authorities reporting that "Phase 2 is terminated."

[edit] Alternate ending

The longer alternate ending included in the 'extras' on the DVD reveals the 'owners' to be the government. It is unclear in the shorter version who they are, but it is assumed they are Izon. Kate is executed in both versions, but she is praised for being the first operative to make it out alive. In the alternate ending it is revealed to Kate that she was in the Hypercube for just six minutes and 59 seconds. The cube is owned by the government. It was an experiment used for quantum teleportation.

[edit] Cast

• Kari Matchett as Kate Filmore
• Geraint Wyn Davies as Simon Grady
• Grace Lynn Kung as Sasha / Alex Trusk
• Neil Crone as Jerry Whitehall
• Lindsey Connell as Julia
• Greer Kent as Becky Young
• Bruce Gray as Colonel Thomas H. Maguire
• Philip Akin as The General
• Andrew Scorer as Dr. Phil Rosenzweig

[edit] Links between characters and Izon

The characters begin to realize that it is their relationships with a company called Izon that seems to be the common thread between the prisoners. To one degree or another it appears that each character posed a threat to the Cube's existence becoming known by the wider public, possibly leading to their imprisonment.

• Kate Filmore – tells the group she is a psychotherapist and seems to have no connection to Izon. However, her link with Izon is revealed at the film's end: she was ordered to enter the cube and retrieve Sasha's necklace. She is portrayed as the most empathetic character in the group, being the only person to risk her life to save Sasha.
• Simon Grady – a private detective who was hired to search for the missing Rebecca Young, who was also imprisoned in the Cube. He seems to be the character who best adapted to the unusual environment of the hypercube as he survived for the longest amount of time by far.
• Rebecca Young – a missing young Izon worker whose parents hired Simon Grady to find her. It is implied that any holes in the story or questions about the story could have been answered by her as her flashback sequences in the beginning of the film speak to the fact that she could have been deeply involved and had intimate knowledge of the procedures used by Izon in their experiments with the hypercube.
• Sasha Lee/Alex Trusk – a blind teenager whose link only becomes known in the last few minutes of the film: she is in fact Alex Trusk, the enigmatic hacker, described by Max as the best and most ruthless hacker in existence. She seems to have been behind the original design of the hypercube, but attempted to "blow the whistle" on Izon when discovering they were putting people inside. In an act of desperation, she "escaped into the one place they wouldn't dare follow." Her acute sense of hearing saves the group on several occasions.
• Jerry Whitehall – a designer who worked on the hypercube's touch panels for the doors. He also seems to have a rough understanding of Quantum Physics.
• Max Reisler – a computer hacker and game developer who is involved in a legal dispute with a company, Cyber Thrill, that stole his idea for a game. That company used the idea to make the variable time speed rooms in the cube (a feature of the hypercube) and is a subsidiary of Izon.
• Julia Sewell – a defense lawyer representing Izon.
• Mrs. Paley – a retired theoretical mathematician who worked for Izon. She was difficult to work with because she exhibits behavior that is usually consistent with being senile, although she is still lucid about certain mathematical theories and concepts. It is she who recognizes the tesseract design engraved in the walls of the hypercube allowing Jerry to piece it together for the others.
• Colonel Thomas H. Maguire – a man who seems to have been intimately linked with at least the first Cube, evidenced by his complaint about the hypercube having no room numbers. According to Max, he is also the government's high-tech liaison in addition to his being one of the higher-ups at the Department of Defense.
• Dr. Rozenzweig – a Nobel Prize nominee, former colleague of Mrs. Paley and former employee of Izon, who was imprisoned within the cube for a while and was found by the group. He is the person who deduces when the Cube's unstable nature will destroy itself.

[edit] See also

• Cube film series
• Simulated reality
• Tesseractic honeycomb

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Cube 2: Hypercube

• Cube 2: Hypercube at the Internet Movie Database
• Cube 2: Hypercube at Allmovie