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The Cell: Limited Edition
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Arrow Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (25th January 2025). |
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The Film
 Oscar (Best Makeup): Michèle Burke and Edouard F. Henriques (nominee) - Academy Awards, 2001 Saturn Award (Best Science Fiction Film): The Cell (nominee), Best Actress: Jennifer Lopez (nominee), Best Costumes: Eiko Ishioka and April Napier (nominee), and Best Make-Up: Michèle Burke and Edouard F. Henriques (nominee) - Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, 2001 Chainsaw Awards (Best Wide-Release Film): The Cell (nominee) , Best Supporting Actor: Vincent D'Onofrio (winner), Best Screenplay: Mark Protosevich (nominee), Best Score: Howard Shore (winner), and Best Makeup/Creature FX: Michèle Burke (winner) - Fangoria Chainsaw Awards Child psychologist Dr. Catherine Reade (Angel Eyes' Jennifer Lopez) has been recruited to test new neurological technology that allows her to enter the minds of comatose patients. The test subject for the last eighteen months is Edward Baines (The Lost World: Jurassic Park's Colton James), the young son of the experiment's underwriters Lucien (Phenomena's Patrick Bauchau) and Ella (Mortal Kombat: Annihilation's Musetta Vander), who comatose state has no medical explanation. Catherine has been able to enter Edward's dream world and speak to him but she has not been able to relieve him of the supposed psychological block to consciousness that is Mokelock, his own personal boogeyman who keeps him a prisoner of his own mind. Facing cancellation of the project due to Lucien's skepticism that Catherine's contact with his son could very well be her own hallucination, Catherine tries to convince the experiment's developer (Happiness' Dylan Baker) and consulting physician (In Fabric's Marianne Jean-Baptiste) to reverse the link and let Edward enter her mind, but they are wary of not only the boy's trauma at realizing that his own world is not real but also the possibilities of physiological damage that Catherine might suffer. They get another opportunity to prove the results of the technology when FBI agents Peter Novak (Clay Pigeons' Vince Vaughn) and Gordon Ramsey (Dawn of the Dead's Jake Weber) bring in serial killer Carl Stargher (Full Metal Jacket's Vincent D'Onofrio) who is in a permanently unresponsive state after collapsing due to a rare neurological form of schizophrenia that always ends in a comatose state before death. Stargher has already claimed seven victims, young women who he starves and then drowns, bleaching their skin to turn them into dolls, and time is running out to find where his next victim (The Last Days of Disco's Tara Subkoff) is being held based on the time frame of a series of videos of his past kills. Getting into Stargher's mind is easy enough, but as she explores his surreal childhood world of arrested development and repressed trauma, she meets his inner child (A.I. Artificial Intelligence's Jake Thomas) but also the frightening king of his domain, and Catherine might not be able to get back out unless she is able to draw the killer into her mind from inside the program. The debut feature of music video director Tarsem Singh from New Line Cinema's peak period of high budget filmmaking – when they were hoping to replace Freddy Krueger with Jason Vorhees after Paramount concluded their franchise – The Cell is visually- and aurally-striking but, in retrospect, it is pretty much every serial killer movie cliché post-Manhunter, Silence of the Lambs, and Se7en filtered through Dreamscape, Altered States and director Singh's music videos (particularly his award-winning video for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion"). Whereas Francis Ford Coppola was able to make all of his artistic and cinematic borrowings coalesce into Bram Stoker's Dracula – with which the film shares co-costume designer Eiko Ishioka reworking Vlad's exposed muscle wolf armor into the suits the dreamers wear here as they hang suspended from wires in an image seemingly cribbed from Coma as a visual analogue to Stargher hanging from hooks attached to loops implanted in his back in a perversion of Hindu asceticism as the masturbates over his doll victims – Singh's film feels like he just filmed his mood board in between trying to inject life into the dull waking life sequences. Lopez is not as bad as anticipated, but Vaughn – who already struck out as Norman Bates in Gus Van Sant's trainwreck shot-for-shot remake of Psycho – is a caricature of the haunted, driven detective saddled with some awful dialogue by debuting screenwriter Mark Petrosevich (whose concept would be pretty much recycled by Hollywood's recent horror bigwigs James Wan and Leigh Whannell for Insidious: Chapter 2); indeed, Vaughn is better in the more improvised exchanges and the mostly non-verbal material once he enters Stargher's mind. It may be the fault of the writer that the beats (or the bones) of the story show through or the need to make them that evident for studio readers or even scaling down in the editing, but the story lacks any emotional resonance. As has become the cliché, everyone is motivated by trauma and it all comes out – with Novak's monologue about the reason he switched from prosecuting killers that motivates Catherine to re-enter Stargher's mind seeming calculated and manipulative not of Catherine not as the audience surrogate but just telling the audience – the killer's inner child angle is pop psychology, and it is quite obvious structurally where the film will go at the conclusion with Catherine regarding her original patient Edward. The film's strengths are aesthetic, from the production design of Tom Foden (The Village), the effects of K.N.B. Efx Group and the appliances of Oscar-nominated Michèle Burke (Interview with the Vampire), and the scoring of Howard Shore (Dead Ringers) mixing the London Philharmonic Orchestra with various Eastern instruments. The CGI is more interesting in conception that execution, dating back from that time in which digital additions always managed to look flat overlaid against the depth of live action backgrounds (it is just as well that the "dream" sequences are more aggressively graded than the waking scenes). Ultimately, The Cell is less interesting as a feature in itself than as an artifact of the early 2000s in the context of New Line Cinema's heyday, the injections of various novelties into the already stale serial killer genre, turn-of-the-century visualizations of virtual reality, and the generation of music video and television commercial directors turned feature filmmakers who had already been working with some of the same effects technology for their small screen work. Singh made a more assured follow-up on a lower budget with the more ambitious The Fall but his subsequent sporadic output has included uninspired studio flicks like Immortals, Mirror Mirror, and Self/less while his latest film Dear Jassi appears from descriptions to be more actor-centric. Petrosevich subsequently scripted an early draft of Freddy vs Jason for New Line Cinema around the same time – subsequently scripted the Poseidon remake, the Will Smith version of I am Legend with the happy ending, the first in the Thor franchise, Spike Lee's Oldboy remake, and most recently the Apple TV detective series Sugar. 
Video
The Cell was released on VHS and New Line Platinum Series DVD in 2000 in its R-rated theatrical cut while international territories – including the U.K. – got a slightly longer version which did not reach the United States until Warner Bros. acquired the New Line library and released the film on Blu-ray (the same edition was also distributed by Warner in Germany, Italy, and Japan while Canada and France got the theatrical cut (with the longer version on a bonus DVD only). Arrow's separate 4K UltraHD/Special Features Blu-ray (U.K.) and two-disc Blu-ray (U.K.) editions feature three versions of the film. The first disc on both sets features the theatrical cut (107:19) and the director's cut (109:18). Sourced from a 4K scan of the 35mm negative and the film scans of the film's digital effects sequences, the presentation is variable. The dream sequences are richly saturated while the waking sequences are more subdued with only the red of the suits worn by the dreamers popping against gray and blue-tinged lighting. The digital effects remain of their time and scenes which are entirely digital can look quite flat including the wormhole journey that marks the entrance into the sleeping state. Some instances of softness, focus, and jitter seem to be that of using actual camera cranes and helicopter mounts rather than modern drones and motion control mounts. The Dolby Vision 4K version gives a better impression of depth and shadow during the waking scenes shot in normal environments and lighting while the dream sequences seem to sport just a superior delineation of colors, with the African desert looking a bit more textured but the more digitally-augmented sequences look even more artificial, particularly Catherine's world where she lures Stargher in which some of the close-ups feature a border of growing vines that looks exactly that, a frame around the image rather than thriving flora. There are also some uses of digital effects in the waking scenes that also become flattened in the attempt to add depth like a shot of digitally-added heat waves to a foreground shot of jet engines. Taking into account the CGI of the period – well, the CGI not created by ILM, Digital Domain, or Pacific Data Images – the 4K edition is the way to go, but the Blu-ray perhaps seems a tad more "texturally" consistent in 1080p SDR. 
Audio
All three versions of the film come with DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and 2.0 stereo tracks. It goes without saying that the 5.1 track is the way to go, better spreading out Shore's loud and chaotic score from the effects and the dialogue, including some softly-delivered improvised background dialogue is less crowded in the discrete center channel than matrix decoded from the 2.0 track. The effects work during the dream sequences is highly-detailed and sometimes it is hard to distinguish Shore's score from the some of the odder noises of the environment. Optional English SDH subtitles are also included.
Extras
The director's cut is accompanied by four commentary tracks. First up is a new audio commentary by film scholars Josh Nelson & Alexandra Heller-Nicholas who argue that the film is not a Silence of the Lambs knock-off and knows its place within the serial killer genre that goes beyond the Demme film and encompasses a variety of approaches beyond the stripped-down procedural. They also discuss the way the film not only embodies then-current anxieties about humanity and technology – pointing out how its science fiction elements are shared with a number of its contemporaries like The Thirteenth Floor (also featuring D'Onofrio), Virtuosity, and Dark City – as well as noting Petrosevich's interest less in the thoughts of a serial killer than their imagination, as well as pointing out that he cited A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors as a touchstone in the treatment of dreams reflecting inner worlds. In discussing Singh's other works, they suggest that the film is best revisited in relation to The Fall, with the latter more successfully embodying concepts he was exploring in The Cell which is not the beginning but a continuity of "fascinations" evident in his music video and commercial work. Next up is a new audio commentary by screenwriter Mark Protosevich, moderated by film critic Kay Lynch in which he reveals that he wrote the script around 1992 and sold it to MGM where it languished until it went into turnaround and reached the attention of executives at New Line, after which development accelerated. Although he goes into detail about how much the film varies from his script – and Lynch points out differences between drafts – he stresses that Singh demanded no changes to the story, just the visuals and he was happy to comply, noting that Singh disliked the Grimm's fairy tale environment of the script (he suggests that Singh did not think the current cinema technology could render such environments believably, but the director may have been concerned about being derivative of The Brothers Quay after noting in his commentary discovering that they had already done a concept he thought to have come up with himself). He also discusses his impressions of the film itself as well as shedding light on just how much input he really had as a screenwriter with a co-producer credit. Ported from the DVD is the audio commentary by director Tarsem Singh recorded for the theatrical cut but synchronized to the director's cut. In refreshing contrast to the first time feature director gushing about his decision to go all out on the visuals – including insisting on shooting the opening sequence in Africa on a dune and beach that looks deliberately artificial rather than finding an American desert and working with Ishioka whose work he admired in television commercials – he is also quite frank for a studio track in discussing the compromises with the studio – including New Line's Michael de Luca (In the Mouth of Madness) – and his own missteps. He reveals that he had to do a lot of tinkering to shape Vaughn's performance in the editing because there was not enough screen time to do the full arc of seeming jerk to sympathetic, that the seal hunting mentioned a few times early on was a subplot that was mostly dropped, and that scenes depicting the terror of Julia were hurt by annoyance that the actress lied about her swimming abilities and that it was too late to swap roles with the first victim played by Catherine Sutherland. He also reveals that cast James Gammon (Silver Bullet) before anyone else, that Shore's score was not what he had in mind but gave the film a better cohesiveness than the temp track – including using tonally dissonant Indian "wedding music" for the sequence of the FBI arriving at the institute – and also discloses that the scene of Lopez in her underwear was studio-mandated. Also ported for the earlier edition is an audio commentary by director of photography Paul Laufer, production designer Tom Foden, makeup supervisor Michèle Burke, costume designer April Napier, visual effects supervisor Kevin Tod Haug, and composer Howard Shore, all separately recorded and introduced by a moderator a few times during the first part of the track. Laufer recalls the challenges of lighting some of the sets, with the art department helping with flourescent and reflective materials in the sets, his decision not to shoot the film in anamorphic, and using Panavision cameras and lenses for the exteriors and Arri cameras and Cooke optics for the interiors. Shore recalls that he initially wanted to do an entirely African score, eventually combing the London Philharmonic and The Master Musicians of Jajouka. Burke recalls meeting Singh through Ishioka who she had worked with on Bram Stoker's Dracula while Napier discusses the fitting and color choices in the regular costumes including accents of red in Lopez's costumes and nude colors and loose fits in D'Onofrio's clothes to emphasize his obsession with flesh and arrested development. Haug contrasts Singh with other directors and the challenge of them communicating their visions and effects artists being able to replicate it.  The first disc in each set also includes "Projection of the Mind's Eye" (89:39), a new interview with director Singh that does, of course, overlap with the commentary track but it revisits the film and some of the commentary anecdotes with some distance in addition to being a more focused discussion for the animated speaker since it is illustrated with clips based on the direction of his discussion rather than him hopping around between what is onscreen and what it inspires. He also discusses growing up in India and going to school in Iran and the Himalayas, going to art school in California with classmates like Michael Bay and David Fincher, with whom he shared an interest in making a serial killer film but were indeed discouraged when Silence of the Lambs came out, and both realizing they could do the related projects brought to them because they "had a take" which in Singh's case was seeing the mind of a killer as a "blank canvas." He also notes that the incongruity between Stargher's white trash persona and his artistic imagination, justifying it in that he did not know what opportunity he would have again to do something on this scale. With some time having passed since the earlier commentary, he is a bit more candid about Lopez who had not yet exploded as a singer but had an entourage and only really clashed with him over her hairstyle, Vaughn's lateness arriving to the set, as well as realizing how difficult people saw him when he no longer wielded the same influence as he did on the set. He also discusses the original ending which remains in the film but had tacked on a sequence from the middle of the film that was originally deleted but then presented with some digital additions. He also briefly notes cinematographer Laufer's alternate grade of the film and putting Arrow in contact with him about it for its inclusion on the bonus disc. "Between Two Worlds" (43:16) is an interview with director of photography Laufer who recalls finding the system of moving up in the camera department at Warner Bros. Daunting so he went to MTV who were taking anyone at the time if they could put up with dire conditions. There he started shooting music videos before being offered a lecturing position at the Art Center College of Design in a class with Singh, Bay, and Zack Snyder and meeting up with Singh after the latter's graduation whereupon they began a collaboration shooting music videos and commercials. Laufer did not like the serial killer genre and did not get the script, but he recognized Singh's interest in creating a fantasy world based on Foden's early drawings, and concentrated on the look of the film from the lighting challenges – discussing a number of sequences – to creating with effects supervisor Haug the pipeline of the digital intermediate process before it was a thing, with Kodak not having hard drives large enough to store the raw data an entire scanned film and burning out the laser of one of the first Arri scanners.  The special features Blu-ray includes a third version of the film: an open-matte theatrical cut with alternate grading (107:09) sourced from the same D-5 HD tape created in 2000 for the DVD. In "Paul Laufer Illuminates" (10:47), Laufer discusses the process of combining film out digital effects and coming up with the idea of anamorphically-squeezing the video before outputting it to film to remove a step since the 2.40:1 extraction from Super 35mm was only 1000 lines high in high defiition; however, the narrative footage that stayed on film would have to go through the anamorphic conversion step since it was shot flat and the film out digital footage would have to be duped again to create a single element from which to make release prints, meaning that the interpositive from which the new 4K transfer was made was five generations away from the negative (Arrow's booklet says the film was scanned in 4K from the original camera negative with director's cut footage scanned from different elements, so Laufer is either mistaken about the interpositive or the film out footage was also scanned separately since it could not have been cut into the negative since the film out was anamorphically-squeezed and the negative was not). In 2000, Laufer took it upon himself to do an HD transfer for the DVD because the studio only wanted separate NTSC and PAL standard definitions for DVD. He kept a backup copy of the HD tape – a composite of the negative and the film out digital footage – and did his own grade. Although a quarter-of-a-century old and created with older scanning technology, this version may actually be the more preferable viewing option. Grain could be better resolved and there could be better delineation of some of the colors but it "looks" more consistently sharper and the slightly more subdued grading brings out more texture in Lopez's white dress, the Namibian beach looks simultaneously fantastical and realistic with some detail in the dead trees that seemed to less evident in the UHD/Blu-ray due to generational loss in the interpositive as well as the contrast-ier grade. Where this approach does stumble, however, is in the cut from the institute to the close-up of the turtle moving through the wheat field. On Blu-ray and UHD, the punchier grading of this shot and the very presence of the turtle itself make it easy for the viewer to believe that this is another of Catherine's visits to an inner world. On this alternate grade, however, it is just a cut to a new, non-fantastical setting followed by the shot of Stargher's truck that confirms that this is reality. Those not averse to the theatrical cut and the open-matte framing – the grade was never released but this might have been the source of 1.78:1 showings of the film on cable – might find it the viewing option to revisit. "Art Is Where You Find It" (12:32) is a visual essay by film scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas who discusses some of the artistic references in the film, including explicit ones like the horse scene referencing a Damian Hirst installation and the Odd Nerdrum painting "Dawn" that belonged to David Bowie when Singh first saw it, as well as more classical sources, noting that the references are not so explicit that the viewer has to "get it" only to recognize them as references and/or be reminding that they might have seen what is being references elsewhere. "The Costuming Auteur" (10:37) is a visual essay by film critic Abbey Bender on the career of Ishioka who only made eight films – starting with Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters on which she also did the production design – and four of which were for Singh. Bender also discusses Ishioka's work on commercials, opera, and Cirque de Soleil, along with discussion of some of the specific pieces for the film. The rest of the extras are ported from the DVD starting with "Style as Substance: Reflections on Tarsem" (11:50) made up of cast and crew reflecting on Singh's visual immagination, 8 deleted/extended scenes with optional commentary by Singh – including an improvised argument between Novak and Ramsey dropped because Vaughn was speaking "normally" and sounded nothing like he did in the rest of the film – as well as the full version of the scene from the middle of the film that was truncated and digitally-redressed for the optimistic ending – six "Special Effects" 6 multi-angle vignettes of sequences shown alongside visual effects supervisor Haug discussing the concepts, the U.S. theatrical trailer (2:25) – although sadly not the TV spots which teased the film's weirdness – the international trailer (1:24), and an image gallery. 
Packaging
The limited edition 4K and Blu-ray editions come in a slipcover with reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Peter Savieri and a 43-page collector's booklet. Josh Hurtado's essay is hyperbolic in its subtitle "How Jennifer Lopez Redefines Genre Film Heroism Through Radical Understanding" but it discusses the earlier roles of the "rom-com queen and pop music icon" whose acting career predated her singing one and included heavier fare than she would come to be associated, as well as contrasting her empathetic psychologist character to more gung-ho genre heroines (indeed, she remains sympathetic to the child Stargher was even as she must kill the monster he has become in both his and her inner world). Heather Drain's essay is subtitled "Music Video DNA in The Cell" and looks at Singh's art references in his music video work preceding the film beyond the oft-cited R.E.M. video. Virat Nehru's on "Why Style is Substance in Tarsem's The Cell" asserts that Singh was less interested in the procedural aspect of a serial killer film and "merging the sensibilities of abstract expressionism with opera and melodrama." "Movie Geek" Marc Edward Heuck's "A Criminal Conscience" distinguishes the dreamscape from the mindscape, not so much in debating whether Singh's and Petrosevich's dream world is driven by "dream logic" but in discussing three of the film's characters: Edward and Stargher who both suffer from the same disease but whose psychological development has been arrested by different means, and Catherine whose personal trauma was changed due to test audience responses, reducing but not entirely hobbling the emotional resonance of the choices she makes as she reconciles contradictory impulses voiced elsewhere in the canon of serial killer cinema (fans of the genre know exactly where). The booklet also includes a full reprint of Jean Oppenheimer's "American Cinematographer" article on the film from 2000. 
Overall
While some of Arrow's Warner acquisitions for Blu-ray and 4K UltraHD have been questionable (Man from U.N.C.L.E., anyone?), they have certainly made the prospect of revisiting the quarter-century old The Cell more inviting with a wealth of retrospective extras and an alternate version.
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