Vanilla Sky (2001)
Directed by Cameron Crowe
David Aames has it all: wealth, good looks and gorgeous women on his arm. But just as he begins falling for the warmhearted Sofia, his face is horribly disfigured in a car accident. That's just the beginning of his troubles as the lines between illusion and reality, between life and death, are blurred.
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24 films that influenced Vanilla Sky
What critics say influenced Vanilla Sky
Vanilla Sky had the potential to be a mindbending thriller on par with the likes of Jacob's Ladder.
Seemingly inspired by the "what is reality" works of the likes of Philip K. Dick ("Total Recall") and the early efforts of Bruce Joel Rubin ("Jacob's Ladder"), the plot is convoluted but not distractingly so, and contains an ending that's supposed to blow viewers away.
A vinyl-collector’s version of “Jacob’s Ladder,” 2001’s “Vanilla Sky” bravely dove into surreal, head-swimming sci-fi — casting Tom Cruise as an unhinged, maimed malcontent and examining the folly of substituting entertainment for experience.
We're immersed in the psychological, the pathological, even the metaphysical, with echoes of such diverse influences as Cruise's own Eyes Wide Shut and the under-appreciated 1990 thriller Jacob's Ladder.
Vanilla Sky, Cameron Crowe�s pretty remake of Alejandro Amenabar�s 1997 Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes) changes so little that one could almost think his true inspiration was Gus Van Sant�s version of Psycho, which was nearly identical to Hitchcock�s.
Vanilla Sky (the name refers to a painting by Monet) is the quirkily titled American remake of the 1997 Spanish language feature, Open Your Eyes .
Written by Cameron Crowe based on the film Open Your Eyes (Abre los ojos), by Alejandro Amenábar.
In "Vanilla Sky" -- a remake of Alejandro Amenabar's "Abre los ojos" ("Open Your Eyes"), which also featured Cruz -- Tom Cruise is a young publishing hotshot who, like a bumblebee in Helmut Lang, flits from flower to flower, never landing long enough to fall in love.
Before Waking Life asked whether our day-to-day lives might be just a dream from which we have yet to wake up, and before The Matrix suggested that the world was an illusion fed to our minds by an evil computer network, there was Open Your Eyes, a 1997 film by a young, up-and-coming Spanish director, then in his mid-20s, named Alejandro Amenabar, which explored similar questions about the nature of reality.
And unlike Steven Soderbergh who took a bad movie and remade it from the ground up with Ocean's Eleven , Crowe took a great movie, Alejandro Amenabar's Open Your Eyes , and began whittling at it from the top down.
Then again, so was "Open Your Eyes," the Spanish film it's based on.
…never saw The Game, but I loved The Matrix.
In the end, "Vanilla Sky" resembles a fast-and-flashy variation on "The Sixth Sense," with touches of "The Matrix" as a bonus.
"Vanilla Sky" is ethereal, but it's really just a lot of whacked-out psychological mumbo-jumbo, reminiscent of "A.I." and "The Matrix," and not in a good way.
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I was hanging in there with Tom until the “Porpoise Song” from the Monkees’ 1968 film “Head” began to chime in the theater, bringing me back to the reality that “Vanilla Sky” is nothing more than a overwrought attempt to say that dreams can turn into a nightmare at the blink of an eye.
Those of you who have seen the trailer for “Vanilla Sky” are given the mistaken notion that this is a New Age remake of “Fatal Attraction,” with Ms. Diaz doing the Glenn Close bit and wanting revenge on her cheating lover from a one night stand.
In fact, I have to give bonus credit to the leggy, lethal Diaz--who would have thought the girl with the giant, friendly smile could go so Fatal Attraction?
Think Fatal Attraction meets Terry Gilliam.
Don't let the trailer fool you -- this is not a hip, new-age variation of Fatal Attraction.
Crowe, ever the hipster, even calls upon the archetypes that postmodern American pop has repressed into its subconscious: Really, don't all current dream girls worth their salt owe a debt to Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut's Jules and Jim?
"Vanilla Sky," like the 2001 pictures " Memento " and " Mulholland Drive " before it, requires the audience to do some heavy lifting.
Like puzzle movies from Memento to Fight Club, Vanilla Sky is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
"Vanilla Sky" is an odd mixture of science fiction, romance and reality warp and will probably be compared to "The Sixth Sense" and "Memento" for its ability to confound its audience.
It is the most stylistically audacious film to be released by a major Hollywood studio since Moulin Rouge, and should spark more repeat viewings and heated arguments than any movie since Memento.
To appreciate "Vanilla Sky," you will have to share David's philosophy, because all this is just foreplay to a mind-puzzler that is not as ingenious as "Memento" but almost as boggling.
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This time around he attempts to solve one of those movie puzzles that seems to be more and more common since the success of "The Sixth Sense".
As a result, the explanatory flashbacks at the film’s end brought none of the satisfying sense of discovery that came from revisiting key scenes at the end of The Sixth Sense.
"Vanilla Sky" is an odd mixture of science fiction, romance and reality warp and will probably be compared to "The Sixth Sense" and "Memento" for its ability to confound its audience.
In the end, "Vanilla Sky" resembles a fast-and-flashy variation on "The Sixth Sense," with touches of "The Matrix" as a bonus.
Before “The Matrix” and “Vanilla Sky” (or “Abre Los Ojos”), before “Memento” and “Waking Life”, there was “Total Recall”.
Seemingly inspired by the "what is reality" works of the likes of Philip K. Dick ("Total Recall") and the early efforts of Bruce Joel Rubin ("Jacob's Ladder"), the plot is convoluted but not distractingly so, and contains an ending that's supposed to blow viewers away.