Vanilla Sky review

I had been wanting to see theis film for a long time, and finally got to take a look the other day, and boy was i confused.

The film follows David Aemes (tom cruise) heir to a succesful business in the heart of New York. At a party he meets Sofia Serrano (Penelope Cruz) and begins to flirt with her. Their romance flourishes, but ex-girlfriend Julianna Gianni (Cameron Diaz), in an insane fit of jelousy drives a car containing David and herself off a bridge.

Julianna dies but David survives. He is physcially and mentally scared, now wearing a mask to hide his disfigured face. He meets once again with Sofia, but she is uneasy around a drunk David. He ends up passing out, but in the morning SOfia promises to be with him and help him deal with his problems. Surgeons begin painstaking plans to rebuild his face, but David begins to have hallucinations. He is told he can save the world by a man, and cannot distinguish between Sofia and the dead Julianna.

There is an ongoing narrative in the future where David is in jail serving a sentence for murder. Dr Mcabe is listening to David's retelling of his life up until this point, and he cannot believe he murdered anyone.

The film goes onto delve into David's mind, explaining who he killed and why. David thinks he has connections to a chryogenic clinic, and as the film comes to a climax, all sense of time and space are distorted as David gets closer to (or further from) the truth.

This film was very cconfusing, with the use of sepearte narratives and times. I also thought that the two different personalities of David, post-accident and pre-accident were almost like two different people. I liked the distortion of characters aswell as the story line, as even though some sections were repeated, clues were left everywhere to indicate what was really going on. This had a huge impact on me, with the ending leaving me with no idea what actually happened, forcing me to think about it hours after viewing it.

This would not be impossible to achieve during our thriller, with enigma easily created with the opening scene (New York deserted). I like the idea of a deserted place, but i also like the idea of someone is prison, explaining how they there, telling the story backward if you like.

However, distortion would be quite hard to achieve, especially with specific characters merging into eachother. I also think that whilst the dramatic fall from grace of David the young handsome rich business man is a good narrative structure, i do not think it would be plausable, as some sets would be hard to capture