Although confusing at first because of the strange story and the psychological dream sequences, it is a good movie that is insightful about human psychology and what we hope and dream for and about.
There is a great conversation about the meaning of sex and love. It has the capacity to make you ask alot of questions about your own life. It also makes that introspection a little scary.
November 23, 2004
Vanilla Sky - 5
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6 comments:
My only issue with Vanilla Sky (and it's a significant one) is that it raises all these philosophical notions of what is reality and how do we know it, but then makes the issues "go away." In contrast, Fight Club raised important issues that remain unresolved despite the plot twist at the end. I think Vanilla Sky trivialized the deep questions it raised, perhaps because it didn't know how to handle them, while Fight Club concedes there is no best way to handle those questions but recognizes that they must be raised.
Anita
I didn't like this movie. Some of the ideas were interesting, him living in a sort of dreamlike state, but I found it to be rather more base then necessary.
I just don't get it! Weird!
I just saw this film again. I have since seen Open Your Eyes. I think the latter is a better film. The main problem with the film is that it doesn't give a good enough picture of how we perceive reality. Since learning more about scientology, it does seem to be influenced some by it.
Does anyone care anymore? It's a few years later, however, this movie struck me quite a bit when I first saw it and still strikes me today. It makes me think about life, decisions, consequences, etc...am I the only one who thought it was a replay of his life in cryogenic sleep/death and the horror of it rerun over and over again and missed dreams of what could have been if he had made the "right" choices?
After re-watching this film for the first time in years, the sequence of events and the meaning of the story became quite apparent to me:
David has everything: all the money in the world, good looks, charm, any girl he wants. But that still isn’t enough, and he takes the girl that his best friend, Brian, had just met and is really into, Sofia.
Everyone in David’s life is in one way or another employed by him through the company that his father had left him, including his best friend Brian. So, David becomes accustom to treating everyone in his life as an employee, even though he never earned that position. David has no real friends, and never learned what it means to be a friend. He is the boss to everyone in his life, and anything that he wants is his, and no one is going to tell him he cant have it.
He treated his “fuck buddy,” Julie, this way. She was clearly madly in love with him, but he refused to acknowledge it, and would only use her the same way he used everyone else in his life. He got away with treating people like this his whole life.
After the night that he meets Sofia, David appears to falls in love with her, and for the first time in his life feels humility. But this is too little too late, because the next morning, Julia breaks down after seeing David spending the night with Sophia, and wrecks her car with David in it, killing herself and mangling David’s face.
After facial reconstructive surgery, David the vain person that he is, realizes that he cannot continue to live with his altered physical appearance. In addition, when Sophia does not respond to him the same way as she did prior to the accident, David elects to preserve his body at a cryogenics lab until a time in the future when medical technology advances enough to restore his face the way that it was before the accident. (It appears as if David does not consider that Sophia will not be there when he is brought back to life sometime in the future; this is because he really does not care about her.)
From early on in the film, scenes weave back and forth from prior to and post David cryo preserving himself. The post cryo scenes are confusing to the viewer, as it does not become apparent as to what they really mean until later on in the film. The post cryo scenes are a dreamlike state that begin the moment after David commits himself to the cryo lab. This dreamlike state is called “Lucid Dream,” and is a new technology offered by the cryo lab that allows the patient to live in a dreamlike state that is programmed to their specifications and lasts the duration of the time they are preserved. David’s specifications are: the life he was living prior to the accident, in a happy relationship with Sophia.
The lucid dream starts out for David as planned, but in an unexpected turn for the worse, the Lucid Dream turns into a Lucid Nightmare, as David begins to treat Sophia the same way he treated Julie, and all of the other women he ever had in his life. Hating himself for this, he kills Sophia by suffocating her with a pillow while in bed. (In this scene, Sophia is represented as Julie, Julie being a general representation for all women in his life. By killing Sophia, David is subconsciously killing a part of himself that he hates. Sophia is not special to him, just like Julia was not special to him, no women will ever be special to him because he lacks humility.) Thus this “Lucid Nightmare” is in fact still his “Lucid Dream,” in that they both represent his real life, as he requested at the cyro lab. Throughout the dream-state, David begins to see himself as others see him, and begins to realize the ugly person he really is (even with a beautiful face).
At the end of the film, David kills himself in his dreamlike state by jumping off of a skyscraper, in turn reintroducing himself to his real life, as he is now ready face life knowing that he needs to change: the ugliness on his inside, not the outside.
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