Vanilla Sky-A Strange, Emotional Journey

Vanilla Sky equally worked for me emotionally as it did on a narrative level. The film shifts through many genres throughout its runtime, beginning as a light rom-com before transitioning to becoming much more dramatic until it spirals into a psychological thriller that then begins, including elements of Sci-fi. These genre shifts kept me captivated, making the film into a consistently unpredictable experience.

But, it's in the emotional core that the film truly captivated me. At its core, the film is a story of a man who has everything who, after a moment of tragedy, begins alienating himself from the people around him. He eventually finds happiness for himself in his relationship with Sophia. But in the film's final twist, the film shows that even that relationship isn't meant to be and becomes fleeting through his actions. There's something so compelling about watching as David loses more and more of his grasp on reality, which alienates him even more from the people around him. Ultimately, the story has David confront who he is and what he would do to make himself happy.

Cameron Crowe's style also helps make the film so engaging. There's a jumpy editing style throughout the film, which gets the viewer into David's mindset throughout the film. There's also a painterly quality to much of the film's visuals, which makes the film consistently visually interesting. Crowe's trademark love of music is also on full display with top-notch needle drops.

The film is undoubtedly messy in the execution of its story. The film reveals its many twists and turns throughout the narrative through somewhat clunky exposition scenes, which could get a bit cumbersome after a point. I also found many of the story's female characters to feel underwritten, with the script giving Cameron Diaz's Julie some frankly ridiculous lines of dialogue and Penelope Cruz's character feeling too much of a "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" in her interactions with Daniel. The film's final twist does alleviate this issue slightly, as it shows that so much of this story was from Daniel's perspective, so it's possible that Cameron Crow intentionally made the female characters feel underwritten since that's how Daniel views them. However, even if it was intentional, it did make many elements of the story, such as David's romance with Sophia, less compelling to me than they could've been.

So, while the film is messy and underwritten in many areas, I still find it to be a captivating experience from beginning to end. The unpredictability of the film's plot from one moment to the next makes the film such a riveting experience. But it's in its story of a man struggling to find happiness as the relationships unravel around him and he loses more and more of his grasp on reality that the film becomes a much more powerful emotional experience.

Now Streaming on Prime Video and Paramount+ in the U.S.