Made me long to see the original

Rating: Null/10 (4 June 2002)

Without having seen it I'm tempted to say I like the original Spanish movie better. Partly it's just induction. Amenábar, to judge from "The Others", is a good director; Crowe, to judge from "Jerry Maguire" and "Almost Famous", is a bad one: unprincipled, lifeless, addicted to painfully ineffective rock soundtracks, visually inept ... yes, "Vanilla Sky" could hardly LOOK more enchanting, but this is surely due to cinematographer John Toll ("Captain Corelli's Mandolin"); the film consists of wonderful images clumsily put together. Look at the very beginning, in which Toll's marvellous bird's-eye cityscape has been cut to ribbons in a - cough - "clever" way.
Look: I'm not complaining. The story (Amenábar's story) is great. (I was put off by reports that it's hard to understand. It isn't.) Dialogue is smart. The photography, as I've mentioned, is gorgeous, shot through with fantasy, romance and lovely colours. It's a good film. If I didn't know it wasn't original you wouldn't hear me complaining. But here, for what it's worth, are some reasons for suspecting that the original is better:
(1) "Open Your Eyes" is CLEARLY a better title - at least for this story. "Vanilla Sky" is romantic but beside the point.
(2) Especially given the new title, Crowe cheats. Vanilla is the colour of the sky in one of David's beloved Monet painting, and it's meant to be a clue that the skies we see after the "splice" have the very same fairytale loveliness - but we never SEE the painting in question, so we're not in a position to tell. It's as if Crowe is frightened we'll suspect something and so, instead of using intelligent sleight of hand, simply whisks the evidence by as quickly as he can. The ideal mystery is both hard to unravel and retrospectively obvious, but if Crowe felt he couldn't satisfy both ideals at once, he should have sacrificed the first, not the second.
(3) Tom Cruise has too many facial expressions. I'm not saying he's a bad actor. Under the supervision of a REAL director - look at "Eyes Wide Shut" or "Magnolia" for evidence - he would have had no trouble whatever with the part. But here, he doesn't just smile at Penélope Cruz: he smiles, then grimaces, then twitches, then smiles a different way, then frowns, and he hasn't even delivered his line yet. This schtick sometimes works but here it just eats away at his character. (Cruz is at once quirkier and more restrained - you can see why HE would fall in love with HER - but then, she's played this part before.)
(4) I've mentioned the appalling soundtrack.
(5) Ditto Crowe's general lifelessness. The twist at the end is precisely what the film needed (yes, it tells us that it was mostly a dream, but what it really tells us is that it was LESS of a dream than it appeared to be); the complete lack of tension is due to Crowe's inability to handle things now that the obvious creepiness is over. Too many encounters, too many consecutive "meaningful" moments, no crispness, no overall viewpoint. It's as if everyone was bored but unable to call it a day. Yet the material itself is NOT boring.