Roots in Monet and Philip K. Dick...

Rating: Null/10 (9 June 2002)

It's interesting to see how vehement people's reviews of this movie are. I'm not surprised, since all of Philip K. Dick's ideas have invariably pushed buttons in people from every walk of life. In this case, Dick's UBIK provided the core of Abre los Ojos, which provided the framework and canvas for Vanilla Sky.
What's important to remember in Crowe's version is that this "remake" of Abre los Ojos is clearly American. The characters, the setting, the dialog, the inside jokes about New York and the publishing world -- if you don't know this culture, you may miss some of the tongue-in-cheek digs.
Cameron Crowe didn't "rip-off" Abre los Ojos, as he has been accused. He didn't just "adapt" it, either. What has happened here reminds me of those famous Van Gogh studies of Japanese paintings. Van Gogh was intrigued by Japanese artwork, and he had the opportunity to study prints of Hiroshige's woodcuts and Eisen's "The Courtesan." But instead of merely copying these prints, Van Gogh re-interpreted them using bold strokes, rich, vibrant colors, and the mark of impressionistic work: capturing the impressions of detail at a distance, while things are blurred up close. One sees the meaning only when the whole picture is taken in.
So Vanilla Sky is really an impressionistic re-working, or re-interpretation, of Abre los Ojos, which was in itself an interpretation of Philip K. Dick's _UBIK_. But this doesn't lessen the impact of Vanilla Sky in any way. It stands alone as its own slice of (possible) life, a study of superficial human foibles layered, like the skin of an onion, over the core of human reality.