MovieChat Forums > Cellular (2004) Discussion > Has there ever been a movie from the 200...

Has there ever been a movie from the 2000s that has dated worse?


http://mattschley.com/cell.html

http://www.grunge.com/10780/films-aged-horribly/

Despite only being made in 2004, Cellular is already super-dated, thanks to the backbone of the plot: landline phone usage. Yeah, remember those? It was like a phone … but attached to the wall. You couldn't walk more than a foot or two away from it, you couldn't text, and worst of all, no Clash of Clans. All they had was superior reception and crystal-clear communication. Hardly seems worth it.

As Forbes reports, landline phones were still fairly common at the time of Cellular's theatrical release. Today, however, the majority of American households don't use them at all, and the number of people who still have them is plummeting fast. If a house has a landline phone, chances are they only keep it around so the cat has a dangly cord to destroy that isn't important.

Sure, Cellular played up cellular technology — it was 2004, so it wasn't exactly some crazy Jetsons theory or anything — but it still rested on the idea that the movie's kidnapped heroine would have a working, active landline that she could finagle and use to communicate with the outside world. As we move toward a future where landline phones are about as relevant as the Pony Express, Cellular becomes harder and harder to see as anything but antiquated.

All this, by the way, is without addressing the starring role that the Nokia 6600 played in the film. In case you don't remember what the Nokia 6600 looked like, it was this thing: a clunky, chunky, proto-smartphone with a tiny screen, a grainy crap camera, no wi-fi, no lights, no music, just anger. You can see why nobody uses it anymore. Though the Finnish phone was certainly a hit back in the day, now we have iPhones, Androids, and cell reception physically embedded in our brains by 2037 (probably). Cellular could well have the tightest, most gripping plot of all time, but we're too busy laughing at what might as well be tech from the Stone Age to notice.

https://www.cloudave.com/2656/what-nokia-kim-basingers-lifeline-would-be-an-iphone-today/


https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/4wmafq/what_movies_made_less_than_a_decade_ago_already/d68fa2m/

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/3zpayj/what_recent_movies_do_you_think_will_age_badly/cynx361/

https://yts.yt/reviews/cellular-2004-720p

https://www.lipstickalley.com/threads/chris-evans-appreciation-thread-part-xii.1068242/page-61#post-27984182

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In that regard, why not Phone Booth (2002)?

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Yes!!!!!!

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No it's not dated dummy. It was made in 2004. So if they make a movie today set in 2004 WOULD IT BE DATED??? ....I knew when I looked this movie is there would be a thread from some idiot thinking it's dated.....🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

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Well guess what, if a movie is five to ten years old and it's centered on technology (which by design is always going to evolve) then it's bound to become dated inevitably!

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Yeah ok....so tv shows like Mad Men and Halt and Catch Fire are dated now.....those pesky 60's clothing and decor and those pesky 80''s computers....🙄🙄🙄🙄

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i loved halt and catch fire.

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I did as well. Sadly not to many have posting at the H&C board lately. I was an awesome show and had a great ending.

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https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UnintentionalPeriodPiece/TurnOfTheMillennium

A work set in the present day at the time of its creation, but is so full of the culture of the time it resembles a deliberate exaggeration of the era in a work made later.

To provide a concrete example, let's say you're changing channels and come upon a show involving two men sitting at a bar in some tropical country. One in a military-looking uniform with a hammer-and-sickle badge on the side is whispering in heavily accented English about his worries that the Berlin Wall may not last. The other man, sporting a glorious mullet, clips his absolutely gigantic cell phone to his belt before putting his hand on the other man's shoulder reassuringly.

When viewed by someone with even a shaky grasp of history, the historical period is blindingly obvious. Such a scene would have been made at the time with the focus entirely on Cold War politics, but the first thing the modern audience notices are the clunky cell phone and the mullet.

While just about every work becomes somewhat of a period piece after it becomes more than a decade old due to the characters referencing old trends, wearing out of style fashions and using out of date technology, this trope only really applies to works that wear their dates so blatantly that a viewer can identify the era or even year it was made in as soon as they begin to watch it. For example, while the 1990s sitcoms Friends and Frasier show their age in many respects, they don't wear The '90s so blatantly as to have this trope apply to them. On the flip side, a work based heavily around popular music—such as The Last Dragon or Dazzler's solo comic as a superpowered disco diva—can become painfully dated due to the rapidly-changing nature of what's considered "hip".

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The Decline of Nokia...What Happened?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUk6V_fBSPw

Nokia was once dominant over the cell phone market, nearing a 40% market share (compare that to today when the largest company has about 20% market share). Yet today, they're virtually nonexistent in the market. This video takes a look at the rise and fall of Nokia.

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Hmm, I had a good time.

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Ditto, I just watched it not long ago and it's still entertaining.

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It's not that dated.
Read a report that says 40% of people still have land lines. Truth to tell I think that's underreported. Personally, I know very few people who don't have landlines. Everyone I know who runs a home business has one.

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