Better than the original

Rating: 6/10 (10 April 2005)

This faithful adaptation of the overrated Spanish original, Open Your Eyes( 1997)is superior to its predecessor in many ways. Firstly, director Cameron Crowe avoids the original's mistake of making the lead character deeply unlikeable and unsympathetic. Gone is the sullen Cesar from the original! Conversely, Cruise's playboy tycoon David is much more sympathetic character, whose flaws are not grounded solely on a nihilistic desire to end his nightmarish paranoia, but rather to find meaning in the lucid dream he has entered. Crowe presents David as a human figure, holding on to his only chance of first love. The original, in contrast, was lost in its own nihilistic cul de sac. Little was shown of Cesar's inner life. Crowe has a field day examining the nature of memory through media-saturated images that stay in our mind - album covers, songs, film clips. They all make up the texture of the human mind and memory - and it's this aspect (which was missing from the original) that invests Vanilla Sky with a surprising intellectual dimension. Is our memory constructed so much by the media that we cannot differentiate levels of reality? The notion of the lucid dream is represented more vividly in Vanilla Sky than the obscure, quasi-Descartian fluff about artificial perception in the original. Crowe ties lucid dream to corporate re-branding of reality and in this sense is saying much more than the flat rendering of this hyper-reality dreamed up in the cold, austere original.
Sometimes remakes are better than the original.