It was bound to happen sooner or later, a movie where cell phones feature prominently as the bad guy. Based on a real-life communications monitoring program of the United States government, "The Echelon Conspiracy" is a movie that visits old science-fiction tropes through the use of the latest technology in telecommunications, the cell phone. Now this idea may be a surplus these days, true, but imagine when the innovation was not introduced thus constricting other ideas that go along with it. The cell phones play one of the most important roles in the movie being the only form of communication and in some cases, the bad guy.

Actually, cell phones only seem to figure in so prominently at first - it eventually turns out (SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT) that it's a computer controlling everything behind the scenes. Actually, technically speaking, it's the software that's run amok, software that has somehow achieved a certain level of consciousness.

Two issues of great interest immediately spring to mind: the real-world Echelon program, still so much shrouded in secrecy that the U.S. government still does not confirm or deny its existence, and the curious phenomenon of self-arrangement, or spontaneous order, in nature.

Alas, the film does not address any of these points, really, and by the halfway point of the movie even cell phones take a back seat to the standard Hollywood standbys of car chases and gun fights. This brought up the idea of advertising a brand new phone model into society. If the audience does not have it already then it will be a fascinating sight to see which might end up with them purchasing one. But if they already have it, they will bring about a lot more faith on their phone and provider. But that's not all, when a cell phone is advertised who else do you think is watching? That's right, the other companies. Instead of competing why not just buy some to introduce to their customers?

It's not a bad movie, to be sure; the case is engaging enough considering the material they have to work with, which is your basic action-spy-thriller. And it all starts off intriguing enough, opening with a woman mysteriously reading instructions in her mobile handset, to the point of descending into the Washington, D.C. metro's tracks, where she meets her end - only to have our protagonist mysteriously receive the same mysterious phone in the mail during the next scene, a phone which, it turns out, provides the most prodigious of instructions concerning apparently random events, from airline crashes to jackpots. It's an exciting premise, but ninety minutes of screentime almost assures that any treatment can only be overly facile.