One..........Big..........MESS!!!!

Rating: 3/10 (11 December 2003)

I first went to the theater to see this with my girlfriend....needless to say I fell asleep half way through...she somehow stayed awake through the whole thing and we both immediately wrote it off as a horrible film. It just showed on HBO and I finally decided to sit through it and actually watch it this time, and my opinion hasn't changed. As another reviewer put it, Vanilla Sky tries TOO HARD to be clever. I got the gist of the film from the first 20 minutes and the last 15 minutes. That's all I needed. Everything else in between is useless. I read all the people talkin about this movie, saying that whoever doesnt like this movie don't like to think and 'don't know anything about movies', and so on and so forth. Okay..... its one thing to try and bring a story with deep meaning and insight into film....but its another thing to cram a bunch of philosophical, sci-fi babble into a film and pass if off as 'clever' and 'imaginative'. That's exactly what Crowe does with Vanilla Sky. Amazingly, in trying to do all of that it STILL finds a way to come off as boring. Now I get the whole thing about getting a second chance at life, and finding happiness and true love and such...but CMON!
Experiencing Vanilla Sky is like me asking someone to do a puzzle while I slowly drop its pieces onto the canvas as the person tries putting it together....only to then bring the person the puzzle almost put together with a few pieces still missing. It's all a big MESS! I see what they were trying to do with the story, but they couldn't present it better than this??? A bunch of ill conceived, drawn out, disjointed sequences that has no irrelevance, to the point where the story itself is lost?? Vanilla Sky represents a cop out in filmmaking, its that simple. "Lets just confuse the HELL out of them for 2 hours and in the last 20 minutes just explain everything that just happened". What's the point? It's all a waste of time. The only thing that matters by the end of the movie is, as I said, everything up until the car crash and the last 15 minutes on the roof. The story was executed SO POORLY, that anything other than those two parts is just an excuse to drag the story along. This movie was TERRIBLY executed. It could've been so much better if it was organized and constructed better.
*1/2 out of **** stars