An unintelligible mess of unexplored ideas and unresolved threads.

Rating: Null/10 (17 December 2001)

For a movie that purports to turn a microscope on our obsession with aesthetic beauty, our perpetual consumption patterns and our unyielding fascination with pop culture, Vanilla Sky is a maddeningly shallow film. One that, ironically (in the absence of any abiding insight) succeeds only insofar as it leaves behind a trail of beautiful imagery, discarded ideas and Crowe's hipper-than-thou pop-referential aura for us to gnaw on. Like pop culture - which deals primarily in beauty, hollow ideals and varying degrees of hip, Vanilla Sky is a crushingly empty proposition.
It does start promisingly, though. Within the first hour, Crowe plants the seeds for a variety of tantalizing ideas. It's all enough for one to reasonably expect that we're in for a learned, erudite meditation on the tricks of mass media, our reliance on superficiality, the cause for our unhappiness in the face of such shiny, happy billboards.
What we get instead is a cutesy love story that ultimately becomes bogged down by the film's cumbersome finish. Given the subject matter, you'd expect the answer to the film's most prevalent question (is Cruise's character being set up? is he insane? is he dreaming?) to have some sort of overarching meaning. It does not.
On the contrary, Crowe's final message is a dreadfully insipid one. Combined with its delivery (in a tidy package whereby every one of the film's questions is dismissed and explained away in frustratingly broad strokes), you're left feeling cheated, manipulated, disengaged.
So then; all style, no substance. Great music, though...