To me this movie is not about going insane at all......it's much much more....

Rating: Null/10 (27 August 2006)

This movie made a huge impact on me. When I saw it, and then saw it again numerous times on DVD, I was always very emotionally disturbed by the deep places the movie goes.
I never thought about Tom Cruise being an insane murderer, driven to extremes because of his guilt.
To me, the central message of the movie is that one moment in life, ONE moment, can change things forever. It's a life lesson that smacks you in the face like brick. For David, the one moment is that he has treated this girl like a toy, with no respect, and she's hurt by it, and in her rage and love for him, angrily tries to kill them both because it hurts too much. She can't stand being his love puppet any more. She WANTS to be taken seriously by him, but to David, she's just a toy.
And I absolutely love the way this movie weaves in modern technology as a possible way "out" of a bad reality that we have created for ourselves through our own rash decisions. It shows a potentially frightening future of being able to "live how we wanted to" after we die, through a prolonged filtered dream life.
To me, this movie is really a mix of techno future, drama, alternate reality, and maybe even slightly fantasy. Not at all a psychological thriller/murder mystery in the least! What happens between him and Sophia, or the supposed murder, is secondary to the central theme of trying to alter one's real life through suicide induced "after-life".
I see this as a kind of a "Heavy Metal" type graphic novel fantasy story, in which a young man who has a devastating accident and can no longer handle the loneliness and pain of living as a disfigured mutation in society. In desperation, he turns to prolonging his life after he commits suicide, and does it in a very haunting way, the "lucid dream" in which he can have whomever he wants as a lover, have whatever life he wants, or should have had if things had not gone so wrong.
I don't think that the tech support man at the end of the movie ruins anything....in fact I like that he explains what happened to David. To me the explanation makes the whole fabric of the story that much more haunting.
To me, the plot was actually pretty straightforward. And I personally feel that his life was completely real up until the point he committed suicide. At that point the company that froze his body switched on the "lucid dream option", which begins by Sophia accepting his disfigurement and picking him up off the street and taking him in(the point where David's life is over, and the lucid dream kicks in), and they fall in love all over again. What a lot of movie goers failed to grasp was that David was not DREAMING or hallucinating what he wanted in life while he was still alive....but that half of the movie actually takes place with him already dead.
And another thing that movie goers really failed to grasp onto....was that all that was really happening in the second half of the movie was what the tech guy said it was..a GLITCH! And I love that concept! That maybe the company hadn't worked out fully the technology of the lucid dream, and that things could go wrong in this death/dream state. That's why tech support had to go in and enter David's world just like another character.
I mean think about it...if you are already in a lucid dream state, the only way tech support could reach you is to enter your dream state and explain what is going wrong! I think of it like a very, very weird type of internet support, except YOU are the subject of tech, and the glitch is in your head.
So, for me this movie is a fantastic vision of the regrets we have in life, and the decisions that led up to those regrets, and...and what if.....what if we could actually have a way to take the consequences away, to take the pain away? That girl that slipped away? That job we didn't take? That thing we wanted to say, but never said before our father died? Make it all better? And, what if while we tried to do that, something went wrong with the technology? I just think that simple premise alone makes Vanilla Sky a haunting masterpiece.
Mike H.