I resisted getting a cell for a long time. I always thought of them as the Mark of The Beast. But it never occurred to me to write a story where they really were the mark of the beast.
Cell the movie stars Samuel L. Jackson and John Cusack and lots of random people turned into zombies/pod people while they were using their mobile phones. Our hero, John Cusack, is using his cell when his battery dies and he is forced to use a land line. This means his wife is on her cell phone when the attack comes. But he has hope that the Wife and Son are still OK. He meets Samual on the Boston Subway and they decide to travel together. So John sets off on his quest to get across the country and rejoin his family.
Stephen King is a great writer and he does amazing things with tension and timing. He also tends to add massive amounts of totally irrelevant and pointless detail that somehow helps with the story. The people who make movies absolutely hate details. This makes it hard for any Stephen King movie to really match the level of a Stephen King novel. I didn’t read Cell and had never heard of it before watching the movie, but I can guess the book must have been better.
Cell moves through the paces. The cast of normal people get smaller and smaller. The hordes of cell zombies get larger and larger. The world becomes more and more post-apocalyptic. There is never a hint that there is any hope, but when the story comes to its inevitable end, it is still a bit of a surprise. It was supposed to be a bit of horror, I think, but then they tried to be funny by playing You’ll Never Walk Alone…really?
As with other sci-fi/speculative fiction, there is no explanation given as to what happened or why. Alien invasion? Government experiment? Terrorist attack? A glitch in The Matrix? We never know. And more to the point, we never care.
Cell was just so much like a million other movies cut from the same cloth.
