Cube III

        No, Mr. Wynn... you do not get a choice. You made your choice years ago,

              Mr. Wynn... I believe this is your signature?

Cube Zero is a prequel to the original Cube movie. Unlike the other movies in the trilogy, the story is set from the perspectives of both those trapped in the Cube and of the people monitoring them. It is revealed that the company behind the Cube, Izon, uses subjects who have supposedly volunteered for the project. The Cube itself is a giant structure consisting of many rooms within. It is 25 rooms wide, high, and deep. Some of the rooms have various traps, including sharp wires, flames, blades, and chemicals. The characters test each room for traps by a method known as "booting," which involves throwing a boot into a trapped room in an attempt to activate any traps. The film focuses on the genius Cube technician, Eric Wynn, and Cassandra Rains, a woman placed in the Cube in whom he finds himself interested.

The film starts with a man, Ryjkin, trapped in the cube trying to navigate his way out. After a while he reaches a cube where nozzles come out of the walls to spray a liquid on to him. He confirms by the smell and taste that it is only water and finds some relief in his tension; however, when he rubs the back of his palm he realizes that his body is disintegrating and he dies.

Eric Wynn, a cube technician feels disgusted watching this sitting in an observation room with his (higher ranking) co-worker Dodd. Afterwards we see Eric Wynn simultaneously sketching a portrait of Dodd and playing chess with him, he keeps asking Dodd questions about their missing colleagues, but Dodd suggests, increasingly insistently, that he not ask too many questions or get too involved with the present occupants of the cube. They get an order from "upstairs" which asks them to record the dream of a subject, who is presently in REM. The subject is Cassandra Rains. In her dream, Wynn sees how she was captured while walking in a pleasant forest with her daughter Anna.

Rains meets the other occupants of the cube who share her plight, three more males and one female. One of the males has a tattoo on his forehead like the soldier that captured her. However, the soldier, like everyone else, has no recollection of his former life.

According to what Wynn knows, everyone in the cube was facing a death sentence once upon a time, and was presented a choice: either to be in the cube with memory wiped out, or to go ahead with the sentence. Only if a person signs the consent form is he or she then placed in the cube. Wynn finds out that Rains has no consent form and argues with Dodd that they should inform the people "upstairs" because this could be a mistrial. Just when he is about to make a call to the superiors, the phone rings. They are instructed to perform the "exit procedure" for a subject who has reached the end through the cube and is about to meet his final challenge. They find that it is none other than Owen, one of their missing colleagues. In the process of the exit procedure, when asked if he believes in God, he answers no. The answer results in his immediate incineration.

Wynn argues with Dodd over the fate of Owen. After realizing that working in the Cube is inhumane, he decides to enter the cube to save Rains, and help her party to the exit.

One of the cube's supervisors (called Jax) and two analysts who report to him come to Wynn & Dodd's work stations to handle the situation created by Wynn's decision to help Rains. Despite their efforts to stop them, Wynn and Rains make it to the exit room with the help of Dodd, who sabotages the connection to the control panels servicing the cube, and subsequently pays with his life when Jax catches him red handed.The sabotage causes the cube to go into "reset mode", which means that the cube will align to its starting position and a "clean sweep" will commence, which will vaporize any living tissue still remaining inside the cube after a limited period of time.

Once they reach an "exit room" (a cube room through which the outside world may be accessed), they manage to use a secret auxiliary exit just before the clean sweep, and after swimming through water for some distance they reach land and try to escape. However, soldiers searching for them have already arrived (these are referred to as "Squad" in the movie, identified by a tattoo on their forehead that resembles the Izon logo). Rains manages to escape, but Wynn is shot by a dart that halts his progress. Wynn wakes up, probably hours later, in a surgery room with a surgeon. He confronts Jax, who reveals Rains may have gotten away, but Wynn had been found guilty of "high treason" and "sabotage" against " both country and God." He has been sentenced to "two lifetimes" and that he will be "modified" for the sentence. Before surgery on his brain begins, Wynn questions his trial, it is then revealed that he, and presumably Dodd, had been convicted, had their memories erased, and been put in the cube as observers, as Jax shows him his consent form. He then dreams about Rains reuniting with her daughter and praising Wynn as "a superhero."

Immediately afterwards, Wynn is placed back into the cube with other "lab rats" and appears to be mentally handicapped. In the last scene, Wynn is shown to act out a scene from Cube in Kazan's role, possibly indicating that Kazan was also once a technician or that Kazan is really Wynn. The basis for that assumption is that Wynn's right hand constantly twitches and in the original Cube Kazan has the exact same twitch and the various implants and procedures (or effects thereof) performed on him before his placement in the cube may be altering his perception of reality. This could also explain Kazan's uncanny ability to perform very large mathematical calculations mentally.

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