vanilla sky

Vanilla Sky is a remake of a Spanish film called "Abres los Ojos" or "Open your Eyes".

Well, actually, in the commentary, the director, Cameron Crow, keeps calling it a cover version. This I think is partly because he's big into music (he used to be a Music Journalist), but also because, from what I've heard, it's almost identical to the original.

I have to confess I wasn't quite as impressed with Vanilla Sky as I think it wanted me to be. Now whether this is due to the original story or something they did (or didn't do) in this cover, I don't know and I wouldn't say I actively disliked the film, but I did find it to be a bit lacking.

I think my big problem with it really was that it lacked ambiguity.

I know that's a bit of an odd thing to say, because if you do some searching around there appear to be quite a lot of theories as to what's happening, and I can see most of them, although I think it's actually fairly clear what the intended truth is, no my problem comes at the end.

I'm going to have to get into spoiler territory here, because the central crux of the film is existentialism - what is reality and how do we know what's real? In this case, the reality is being contrasted with dreams, or more specifically a lucid dream, which is where you can control your own dream.

Anyway, the point seems to be that the main character David ends up in a Lucid Dream and quite where that happens in the narrative of the film seems to be the source of the debate as to what's going on. But to me, what would have been (and is always) a more interesting take on this sort of existentialism is the possibility of whether things are real or not.

So was he really dreaming or not?

The film leaves little doubt that yes, he was dreaming and it's only really mysterious as to when that happens and also whether he wants to stay in that situation. I therefore found it unsatisfying.

But also, I was a bit troubled by the central theme of the film. The "message" (if you will) of the film seems to revolve so squarely around looks it seemed a little distasteful to me. I think it was meant to be about accepting who you are and that looks don't matter, yet it also seems to undermine these as well. Similarly, is it about someone who's narcissistic, yet also hates himself for being narcissistic? If so, why, in the end, does it seem to validate the narcissism?

Oh and for a sci-fi nerd kicker - if you're in cryogenic suspension (that is, deep frozen), how can you dream? And even if that were possible, if you're in cryogenic suspension for a very long time does that dream keep repeating on a loop? And how would they know there was a problem?