Review of Movie: Vanilla Sky

The human mind is considered as the most mysterious object in the world. Sometimes, our mind acts so much incredibly unexpected way that no logic can be able to explain it. All the way through this area made the scholars think about it very seriously; how could make analysis one person thinking with due respect to others’ attributes including society, belief, culture, and to name a few. Hence, the subjects, Psychology, Philosophy and Social Science emerged to deal with people’s mind. The movie, “Vanilla Sky” is labeled as a science fiction and psychological thriller with some mixture of romance as well as reality warp film. Cameron Crowe is the director and co-producer and remade this movie from the Spanish film ‘Open Your Eyes’.  It helps a person to think of the world not only beyond imagination, but also push to think about life in a different perspective. Due to the assignment of review of the movie, I decided to choose this movie among the other 11 movies.

In the following discussion, I did a review the movie based on psychoanalytical perspective. The director created a focal role of the main character Tom Cruise and presented his journey with a name David through his dream, which seems quite unrealistic in my point of view. The actor walked around his life in a different dimension during his dream. He was the person who had everything with a beautiful face.  He had a relationship with a woman named Julie Gianni (Cameroon), but he had fallen in love with Sophia (Penelope). Unfortunately, David had a car accident with his estranged former lover. Julianna died, but David got back his life with a dreadful face. It was quite impossible for him to accept this reality, which affected his personal life and relationship with Sophia. Consequently, he became psychologically disordered and suffocated Sophia but he thought that he killed Juilanna. The whole story was told by David to court psychologist Dr. McCabe in a prison cell who helped him to realize the reality and afterward found that he was in cryogenic sleep. The organization"Life Extension", where David signed under the agreement of Lucid Dream before he committed suicide. Moreover, he decided to wake up and the alarm clock sounds ‘Open your eyes’. Whatever he found in his life, from relationship to death was just a nightmare.

Throughout the movie ‘Vanilla Sky’, the director tried to attract audience to change the scene in the middle of virtual and reality genre and make us understand every scenario as like as the reality. The question arose on mind in the whole movie until the end that he is dreaming or awake. Actually the movie addressed its reality based on its subconscious mind which is about lucid dreaming. The actor frequently asked himself about who is he, from where he belongs etc. Moreover, over the period he tried to make relationship with his love, but his subconscious mind moved him to think in different ways, such as seeing his ex-girlfriend frequently in the position of his new girlfriend, cannot accept the mask after his accident and also he thought his girlfriend did not accept his awful face. He signed agreement before his dying and he did not remember. All of these factors subconsciously hit the actor’s mind and showed as he died, although the reality was he was in a dream.

In my point of view, reality is closely related to the truth. It can be the reflection of truths, which sometimes conceal with deceitfully. Reality often shows its position against imagination, delusion or abstract concept. For an example, I have lost my mother when I was very young. Since I don’t believe my mother died, but the reality is she is no more. However, from the movie “Vanilla Sky” it is not easy to define reality because it has several layers of dreams. At every layer of the dream, reality is what is happening at that specific time and at that specific phase. Therefore, in the movie, the existence issue is the actor. Though he was alive, but his dream made a real view of his dying and his miserable life.