- published: 27 Jan 2016
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The Cell is a 2000 science fiction psychological thriller film directed by Tarsem Singh, and starring Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn and Vincent D'Onofrio.
Child psychologist Catherine Deane (Lopez) is an expert in an experimental treatment for coma patients: a virtual reality device that allows her to enter into the minds of her patients and attempt to coax them into consciousness. When serial killer Carl Rudolph Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio) falls into a coma before the FBI can locate his final victim, Agent Novak (Vince Vaughn) persuades Deane to enter Stargher's mind and discover the victim's location. Stargher's victim is imprisoned in a cell in the form of a glass enclosure that is slowly filling with water by means of an automatic timer.
Deane enters Stargher's twisted mind, where she is confronted by both the violent and innocent parts of the killer's psyche. The innocent half shows her the abuse he suffered at his father's hands, and the birth of his pathology when he drowned an injured bird as a mercy killing. Deane attempts to nurture the innocent side of Stargher's mind, but his murderous half thwarts her at every turn.
The cell is the basic structural and functional unit of all known living organisms. It is the smallest unit of life that is classified as a living thing, and is often called the building block of life. Organisms can be classified as unicellular (consisting of a single cell; including most bacteria) or multicellular (including plants and animals). Humans contain about 10 trillion (1013) cells. Most plant and animal cells are between 1 and 100 µm and therefore are visible only under the microscope.
The cell was discovered by Robert Hooke in 1665. In 1835, before the final cell theory was developed, Jan Evangelista Purkyně observed small "granules" while looking at the plant tissue through a microscope. The cell theory, first developed in 1839 by Matthias Jakob Schleiden and Theodor Schwann, states that all organisms are composed of one or more cells, that all cells come from preexisting cells, that vital functions of an organism occur within cells, and that all cells contain the hereditary information necessary for regulating cell functions and for transmitting information to the next generation of cells.