When I originally planned out the movies for this month, The Girl With All The Gifts was not part of the plan - or at the very least, it wasn't planned for yesterday. Things are always subject to change, however, which is why I ended up seeing and reviewing it rather last-minute. When I looked at things this morning, however, I realised that I had managed to set up an interesting situation - two films side-by-side, both based on bestselling books and both featuring pseudo-zombie apocalypses, the second film being Cell - based on the book by Stephen King. The only difference is that one movie was good and the other... mediocre at best. Can you guess which one is which?
Clay Riddell is heading home from Boston after finalizing a deal with publishers for his graphic novel when a mysterious signal passes through every active cellphone, causing anyone using a cellphone at that time to become a violent, mindless "zombie". Barely managing to escape, Clay bands together with a train driver and a teenage girl to try to escape the city and find Clay's estranged wife and son in New Hampshire. As they travel they observe the "phoners" or "phone freaks" flocking and moving in packs and behaving as though they were a hive mind, and start to have disturbing dreams about one in particular in a red hooded sweatshirt who appears to be the leader. After killing a large flock of them while they are "recharging", however, the dreams increase and they find themselves marked because of what they did. Will the survivors be able to outrun the flocks of phone freaks and find their way to a safe zone, and will Clay be able to reunite with his son?
I've always been a fan of John Cusack, from way back when he was in Grosse Point Blank. But apparently, I've still got the image of him in my head from 1997, because when I first saw him in Cell my immediate thought was, "My gods, Cusack's looking old." My second thought was, "And he looks like he's the lead singer of a The Cure tribute band," because with his pale skin, black hair and all-black clothing throughout the movie, he looks very much like an ageing goth. The slightly askew mental imagery continued with the character of Tom McCourt, who is played by Samuel L Jackson. The mental image I'd had of the character from reading the book several years ago was very much at odds with seeing him portrayed by Nick Fury. But this is something to be expected when books are made into movies, and in the end, it doesn't really matter how much they might differ from our preconceived notions as long as they and the rest of the film are still good. And therein lies the problem.
The movie Cell is very different from the book Cell, and the movie suffers for it. Characters and events are changed or removed entirely - in some cases, an argument could be made for brevity, but in other cases, it just damages the plot. The opening scene when the phonepocalypse first hits has been moved from a Boston park to an airport - I'm guessing to be able to showcase the resulting carnage better, but it just ends up being too busy and not altogether believable. Also remember how I mentioned in The Girl With All The Gifts that there are brief moments of animals being killed, but they're done to illustrate a point rather than for shock value? Well, the opposite happens here, and it's just ridiculous. For the rest of the film, you don't really feel that our survivors are in too much danger, as they were lucky enough to find a house full of guns and apparently near-unlimited ammo, and they don't even have to worry about aiming for the head. There's no real tension for most of the film, beyond Clay's determination to find his son, and even the film's attempts to ramp up the stakes don't really succeed because they never really follow up on it or go into detail. The key example of this would be the apparent "leader" of the phone zombies - at one point he's implied to be a creation of Clay's from his graphic novel - but then everyone keeps dreaming of him. Is he real? Is he psychic? Is he in any way going to impact the plot?
The biggest irony comes with the film's ending. The book's ending is very... King-esque, without giving away any spoilers, but a lot of people apparently didn't like it (I personally thought it wasn't too bad). So when King wrote the screenplay for the movie, he changed the ending. Guess what? The new ending was even more disliked, including by me, because it makes no sense and throws away an awful lot of buildup for an ending which goes nowhere. This isn't an argument over whether endings should be upbeat, downbeat or somewhere in the middle; it just doesn't do anything. And I'm not entirely sure if I appreciated the song that plays over the ending, but that might just be a personal issue for me.
It's always disappointing when a book you enjoyed turns out to be a not-so-good film, and this is the case with Cell. Some major distribution problems certainly didn't help it, but in the end, it falls down because it just feels rushed and out-of-focus (much like the camerawork itself which felt strangely low budget for a film like this). This is definitely a case where I'd recommend reading the book over seeing the film.
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