Customer Reviews

Vanilla Sky : Widescreen Edition

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This should have been one of the greatest movies ever made. Instead it is a confusing, poorly developed, and poorly assembled mess. I am not frustrated. I am angry. I am angry that such a good basic premise for a story was wrecked.

The following remarks will ruin the movie for anyone who has not seen it and does not want to have secrets revealed in advance. But there is no way to explain my anger without being specific.

Here is the story that this movie was trying to tell:

1) Successful young man - played by Tom Cruise - meets woman of his dreams - played by Penelope Cruz - and the two discover true love.

2) Young man makes tragic decision which results in a horrible accident that permanently disfigures him.

3) Young man dies and is put into cryogenic suspension, and at some point in the far future is placed into a lucid dream where he gets to act out any pleasant thoughts, fantasies, or desires he wants.

4) Young man realizes at end that this dream is not real, and chooses to exit the dream and enter the real world.

For this story to create a meaningful dilemma that makes the choice in 4) painful and difficult, we must believe the premise in 1) that Sofia - the character played by Penelope Cruz - is the love of his life and that she in turn shares similar feelings about him. Unfortunately, the movie fails utterly to achieve this goal. Before his accident, nothing convinces me that these two people have more than a shallow infatuation. There are too few moments shared between them, and too little evidence that either deeply needs the other or deeply fills any needs of the other. These are basic failures in the story telling, not dramatic failures in the acting.

But the dagger through this movie's heart is that once David - the character played by Tom Cruise - has his accident, and finally reintroduces himself to Sofia, Sofia almost immediately rejects him. And there is no explanation of this rejection, leaving us with the distinct impression that she is physically repulsed by his new appearance. This has to be the worst decision in the history of film-making. Instantly the movie's main premise collapses, and Sofia is revealed to simply be shallow. We are left wondering what was the basis of her original affections. Was she simply in love with David's beauty? Her inability to re-connect to the physically ugly David signals a complete lack of depth in her affections. Anyone who had feelings of real love would have needed to reconnect emotionally to the lost lover. Sofia shows no such need, nor does she show any conflicted emotions. To me, her love is a disappointing fraud. (At the end of the movie, Sofia is shown going to David's funeral and wondering about their love, but at this point such a revelation is just confusing and unconvincing. Too little too late...movie already ruined.)

At the moment Sofia rejects David, the movie simply collapsed for me. The fact that the premise in 1) is not believable, makes David's lucid dream in step 3) simply a pathetic revolving act of puppy love and wishful thinking. David might as well be a 20 year old boy who is deeply in love with a girl who doesn't like him, and who dreams of loving her over and over and over, passionately, and without any real point since the love isn't two-way. This makes the decision to exit the dream simply painless for the persons watching the movie, once we realize that after the accident happens, that *EVERY* scene involving Sofia loving David is simply a fraud. None of these scenes of Sofia loving David has any basis whatsoever in any actual love. David becomes more like a pathetic drug addict living an unhealthy and habitual existence, addicted to his need for a relationship he never actually had.

If the story makers had made us believe the premise in 1), then the decision in 4) would have taken on a deep angst - choosing between one's real life before death and the uncertainty of a new life in a new world without family, friends, money, profession, or relevant education and experience needed to cope with a world 150 years in the future. As the movie actually develops, of course I want David to choose reality over his pathetic dream. There is no angst in leaving such a hideous unhealthy rotation of thoughts. Anything is better than such a sick and pointless fantasy existence.

Honestly, the movie is confusing enough that most people won't even grasp the attempt at points 1) to 4) as discrete elements in a story. But to anyone who sees the attempted storyline, the makers of this movie missed a huge opportunity to create something deeply philosophical and troubling and complex. A big theme of the movie is that little decisions can have big consequences. Unfortunately, little decisions in the construction of the story had major negative consequences for the film's overall quality and ruined an opportunity to achieve greatness.