Cell

"Quite a problem these cell phones have caused." Clay Riddell (Cusack) has just landed and is talking to his wife about getting together with his kid again. When his phone dies he begins to look for change when all of a sudden he hears screaming and everyone in the airport falls to the ground. What happens next is unthinkable and now, in a type of post apocalyptic world Clay and a small group of survivors try to make it back to his family, before it's too late. I had no idea what to expect from this movie. I liked the fact that it was a Stephen King book, though I never read it, and the idea of technology leading to some sort of downfall is scary in its possibility. All of the excitement started to slowly fade away when the movie fell into what it really was… another zombie movie. The symbolism of cell phones turning people into zombies wasn't lost on me and the movie did have a message in that sense, but it essentially became just another generic zombie movie. Overall, not terrible and this is worth seeing, but I just feel it could have been so much more than another in the line of zombie movies. I give this a B-.

I remember reading this book and thinking what an amazing Movie it would make. With the right cast and script I knew this could be a winner. I waited for someone to make it and finally they did.

We were getting John Cusack and Samuel L Jackson. How could they not make an amazing movie.

I waited eagerly to view this long anticipated adventure and thought the day would never arrive when I could get the chance to see it.

Then I did.

Firstly it has very little in common with the book I read. the book is very clever and draws you into the story. The movie is not clever and the story is thrown at us.

In The book we care about all the characters. In the movie we don't.

I have to admit I walked out before the end. I just couldn't take anymore.

Why oh why did they not just stick to the books narrative.

I know you have to cut corners but they didn't cut corners, they invented new corners that had nothing to do with the story.

I love Stephen King and have read all of his books but I'm tired of seeing them butchered by Movie makers who just don't understand the story.

Save your money. Don't even bother renting this movie.

Watch TV instead.

Considering I went into Cell with abysmally low expectations, it turned out to be not too bad. Not that this necessarily means that it's all good, but there are some good things I can say about this. I'm pretty sure, from what I've heard about the book (at best it's liked but not loved, sort of a middle-tier King work, not one of his triumphs but not a failure either, something fun he could knock off in a month or two as one of those 'hey this is happening in the real world, I'll use it for one of my spooktacular stories' things) that this actually makes for an accurate assessment. It's a standard-issue zombie-ish story of people being infected and going bugf*** insane, only this time King (who also gets a screen writing credit) adds a kind of bird-pulse-hive-mind thing that only gets explained enough to move the plot along.

Maybe in the book it was explained more or better; here, it seems like some weird and borderline lame (or just lame) device to keep us sort of on our toes, like, 'oh, hey, this time they're *not* vomiting blood on one another or eating brains, and any gunshot can kill them, not just the head, gotcha, thanks.' But more lame than that is the generic story thing of 'well, my son and ex are somewhere, and I'm gonna go find them' when, naturally, it's not going to be pretty or something he likes when he finds out (that he being Cusack, who is doing the best he can with fairly weak-tea material). Meanwhile, Samuel L Jackson does his best Ken Foree (intentional or not) from Dawn of the Dead, and is a reason to see the movie - even in the midst of some mediocre writing or plotting, or moments that can make one groan, he's there to work and it's not something to be embarrassed about on his resume.

As for the action, it's... fair. I guess I may be tired of seeing action shot with the shutter off (that's when the camera has this function that makes it go, oh, nevermind, you know it when you see it), and I think Tod Williams is a competent director of action but not one who can make things as thrilling as it should be. By the time you see one character go to a door slowly - not in this, I mean in any other movie you've ever seen in your lives - you've seen them all, and this has a lot of that. And while at one time I felt apprehensive about Eli Roth being the director, as he was attached for a period of time after the book first came out (his movies tend to be Dumb with a capital, sometimes double, D), now I'd be curious as to what he might have changed or made more visceral or f***ed up.

Cell goes through the motions, has some decent atmosphere, and a couple of those strange touches that I'm sure come from that primordial cavern that is King's sub(or regular)consciousness - such as the whole aspect of how these beings screech and them come together (which is a fascinating sight to me), or Stacy Keach having the whole football stadium of infected asleep listening to the... is that the yodeling from that Christopher Lee mashup from LOTR online(?) But there's not enough of it to make it stand out; while I haven't seen enough of it to make a full comparison, my gut tells me this is, to the lay-person, Walking Dead lite, with some good actors doing their best and only rising to meet the absolute minimum required.

... okay, maybe the ending is a little terrible, but my rating still stands.

Watching it right now on Rai2, dubbed in Italian.

At first I thought it was some kinda B movie despite the big names (maybe Samuel L. Jackson and John Cusack have taken the path of Nicolas Cage?) and the level of production. Then, to my surprise, I discovered this was a Stephen King adaptation, and not the brainchild of some wannabe King.

Something's extremely off. Hard to put a finger on it at first look, but the director seems to have forgotten to set a particular mood and pace for the material in hand. This is so rushed it fails to be taken seriously. Even less credible an outcome than Zombie parodies.

And to top it: I believe it requires some kind of special talent to have Samuel L. Jackson as a lead in a movie and still not even manage to make the outcome even moderately entertaining.

I may not even make it till the end.

Okay, people are going to tell you that this movie is dumb and corny and frustrating. Don't listen to them. Admittedly, they're absolutely right, but don't listen to them anyway.

This movie is the closest we're going to get to a sequel to Maximum Overdrive from Stephen King, and it's actually pretty close. Instead of a bunch of disparate stragglers surviving in a world where humanity is overrun by machines being controlled by an alien force, we get a bunch of disparate stragglers surviving in a world where humanity is overrun by people being controlled by an alien force. So it also dips into Walking Dead knock-off territory, where everyone who uses their phone basically becomes a fast zombie; but on the plus side, this still has a lot of King vibes in it.

Do you ever think about horror movies after seeing them and realize, if you view the film from the evil supernatural side of things, its motives make no sense? Like, "if the demon spirit wanted to possess the little girl before anyone could figure out what was going on and stop it, why did it spend the first 45 minutes terrorizing the babysitter and attracting needless attention to itself?" Well, this movie is like that: if you think about whatever mysterious intelligence is behind what's happening, what it decides to make the people it controls do doesn't really add up. But this movie goes the extra step, where you don't even have to do the thought experiment and shift perspectives to see that this movie regularly makes no sense.

It's like King wrote down his dream and these people filmed it. And that's kinda cool if you're prepared to view this film like Kurosawa's Dreams or Fulci's The Beyond. If broken and contradictory logic is going to bother you, you're going to be kicking a hole in your monitor. And for all the fun King brings to his work, there's also his usual flaws. In this case: hokey characters. DJ Liquid? The "you're cute" lady? The King Of the Internet? But it's also kind of charming in a "King's our lovable grandpa who writes these crazy stories" kinda way, and this film gets past them easily enough with plenty of fast paced action and shocking violence.

Other pros: Sam Jackson and John Cusack give their roles more weight than the script deserves. You actually care if they survive and worry for them in a way most lesser films don't manage. Stacy Keach shows up for a bit of fun, too. The story's also ambitious, playing with big ideas and isn't afraid to get pretty dark and cynical, which is nice to see in a more mainstream horror film with a name cast.

Other cons: Most of the down to Earth effects are fine (zombies, gore), but it tries to depict some very big things that clearly just aren't in its budget. There's a scene right in the very beginning where an airplane explodes, which they really should've left off-camera, because it really looks super fake. And some shots in the film's climax look like a cartoon.

Look, this is a heavy-handed movie for technophobes. Everyone who uses their cellphone turns into a mindless zombie. Characters walk through a brand new movie theater with a giant sign advertising "now with digital Projection," and then immediately into a drive-in movie lot. Keach gives a big dramatic reading to the line, "you can't stop progress, but you're never too old to fight it" before firing a bow and arrow. There's nothing subtle for miles around, and I'm sure we all know someone, probably older, who'll applaud the scene where people throw their smart phones into a fire, thinking finally someone else understands that change and technology are evil.

But for the rest of us, it's a pretty amusing, entertaining time so long as you're willing to not question anything it throws at you. Fast paced, loads of thrills, our protagonists walk around with armfuls of weapons and ammo; and yet the film takes itself seriously enough that it never starts to feel like a bad joke. Silly sure, but earnest. All it needed was a rockin' AC/DC soundtrack.