Open your eyes and you will notice the mistakes

Rating: 5/10 (28 July 2002)

Abre Los Ojos was a great film, with solid performances, haunting atmospherics and a unexpected, original ending. Vanilla Sky is the remake, a film that tries to copy Abre Los Ojos and fails rather miserably.
In fact, you can say it very simple : if you have only watched Vanilla Sky, than you're in for a movie that reaches some nice intellectual heights for an American movie with an original ending. But, if you see this movie and then see the original (or if you had already seen that one), Vanilla Sky suddenly becomes a quite lame movie. Which is a shame actually, because I like Tom Cruise and certainly because he has given the attention to Amenabar he deserves. Cruise has always been to me one of better actors in America. But Cruise should have known that the quality of the original could never have been injected in the remake. There are a lot of things which make the original better, but now I'm going to give the 3 main points why this movie is way underneath the original :
1)the performances : how hard Cruise tries, he never puts as much tragedy and quality in his role as Eduardo Noriega. But this goes for every actor here (also Cruz, who had a more sharp, vivid character in the original)
2)the approach : the original is more scary, leaves more to the imagination of the audience and has a better ending (yes, vanilla sky manages to remove some of the intensity of the original ending!!)
3)the music!!! : although the songs on their own are good (2 songs from my fave band REM), the music is just totally inappropriate and actually ruins some of the scenes. you know what i'm talking about when you can compare the 2 movies
therefore 1 advice : just go see Abre Los Ojos and wait until Vanilla Sky comes on television, late at night. Ironically, that's what the special featurette on the VHS edition suggests!!!