Turn it off when he starts yelling, "Tech support!" Trust me; you'll be glad you did.

Rating: 4/10 (7 November 2004)

This film had such potential, but it failed in the end because it gave the viewers far too little credit. This should have been an existential, philosophical, psychological thriller, and up until about the last ten minutes, it was. But rather than let the viewer try to figure out what's going on, rather than force the viewer to open his mind to the possibilities of multiple realities and to answer the questions of identity and sanity and reality raised in the first two hours of the film, it succinctly and in unremarkable language explains what was going on the whole time.
This kind of convenient resolution is all too common in "suspense" movies (see also, Training Day(2001); Arlington Road (1999)) and is dissatisfying to people who actually want to interpret the film. It is typical of filmmakers who are unwilling to take a chance, namely that their film will be misunderstood. Of course when suspense is well done (see, Memento(2000); Usual Suspects, The(1995); Birth(2004)), the filmmaker need not worry whether his intentions were communicated.
The end of Vanilla Sky, and thus the film as a whole, is a symptom of the trend among timid screenwriters to rely on a dubious plot device to make sense of an otherwise weak script. The real tragedy in this case is that the film would likely have been much stronger without this device.