![]() ![]() If it was important, I must have imagined, the film title would have been retained. In fact, when I heard it as the opener I thought, “Oh, what a nice callback to the original film.” I suppose I subconsciously rejected the idea that it could be a meaningful line simply because the film had passed on it for a title. It’s a clue to everything that’s going on, but by rejecting it as the obvious title, Crowe leaves anyone who didn’t know the original film in the dark about the line until it’s explained. Yet, “Open your eyes” is a crucial line of the film, delivered as the opening line of the film, the opening line of Aames’ lucid dream, and the opening line of Aames’ new life in the future. The movie could have been called “Haystacks” or “A Doorway That I Run To In The Night* ” or “Golly, Thanks For The Great Tip On My Paper Route This Christmas” as long as some throwaway explanation was given and it really wouldn’t have had any impact, for better or worse, on the film. Vanilla Sky as a title is explained but really has no tangible connection to the story. I think one important way that Crowe blew it was to reject the title of the original foreign-language film – “Open Your Eyes”. Vanilla Sky has some neat touches, but it left me cold in a lot of ways. He jumps, he doesn’t splat, and the film ends with Aames being woken in a surgical facility to the tune of “open your eyes”. ![]() As this point they’ve got a handle on the whole thing, and he can either go back to his nice happy place with Sofia, or he can wake up (now some 150 years into the future where his face CAN be reconstructed) by jumping off the top of a really tall building, a challenge he set for himself seeing as he’s acrophobic. But something has gone wrong, turning his dream into a nightmare. A nice tech support fellow informs him that following the night where he passed out on the street he signed up for freezing and then pilled himself – the “open your eyes” moment was in fact the start of the lucid dream. A recurring commercial he has seen for a cryogenic company triggers him to gain a flicker of understanding of the flashbacks and jumpcuts littering his dreams and he goes to the headquarters where in the midst of a cryo sales pitch he realizes that he is in fact cryogenically frozen and has elected the “lucid dream” package. Then suddenly, however, comes the solution to the puzzle. Well, there’s that, and there’s the fact that the film suddenly starts jumping timelines to a version of Aames who is imprisoned, wearing a creepy featureless mask, and insisting to a psychiatrist that not only did he not commit a murder, there wasn’t any murder at all. About the only trouble he’s got is that the Board of Directors, who control the other 49% of the company, think he’s a putz of a businessman and may be trying to push him out. Aames is devastatingly handsome, richer than Crœsus, and he’s dating Julia who not only looks just like Cameron Diaz but also is totally into the whole casual relationship commitment-phobe thing. Tom Cruise plays the has-it-all playboy David Aames, the wayward heir (and, following his parents’ untimely death, 51% and controlling owner) of a major New York publishing firm. I haven’t done that, so this review will rely on what I can piece back together from a single-shot viewing. ![]() I understand why Katelynn wanted to see Vanilla Sky again having just seen it – it’s a bit of a “puzzle film” as it were, and once you know the solution you can immediately think back to scenes that are going to make more sense the second time around, and the temptation to see just how the film fits together with that hindsight is pretty high. Another of the “punch my mom in the face” actors ![]()
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