Pretty Good

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Just in order to say "Abre Los Ojos" is much better than "Vanilla Sky". The atmosphere, all the charm, anyway... The rhythm! This movie has concepts that have been used by many others. Nevertheless it is unpublished by the script well elaborated. Tom Cruise soon realized that it was an engaging story, which catches the eye of the movie buff. However the Spanish film is much better.

A routine party is the beginning of a chilling trip for Cesar. One girl is after him, he goes after another, and before he knows it, very disturbing things are afoot. Open Your Eyes, the second film from 25-year-old Alejandro Amenabar, combines romance with a bit of horror, a heavy dose of psychological thriller, and a splotch of sci-fi into an unusual treat. Rather than satisfied, it leaves you slightly on edge.Cesar (Eduardo Noriega) is a handsome devil, all boyish charm with a very shy act to cover his self-assuredness. Indeed, he's reputed to never sleep with the same woman twice, so naturally when Nuria (Najwa Nimri) tries to bend that rule Cesar declines not so politely. Instead he hides behind Sofia (Penelope Cruz), the girl his best friend, Pelayo, came to the party with.Lucky not only with beauty, Cesar is also quite rich. He has three cars, but Pelayo (Fele Martinez) complains that Cesar only uses the cheap old VW bug to pick him up on the way to racquetball. Is this fact a humorous note, or does it point to a serious character flaw in Cesar? Later, at the party, he ends up monopolizing Sofia's attention, to Pelayo's disgust. When Sofia tells Cesar that if he were a loyal friend he would not try to sleep with her, Cesar replies that he is indeed a loyal friend, and therefore wants to have an affair with Sofia but be sure to prevent Pelayo from finding out about it. Rebuffed, Cesar regroups to try Sofia another day, and as he leaves her apartment he begins the ride of his life.Though the plot to Open Your Eyes is dense, to say much more would reveal too much already. On the other hand, the layers of reality that director Amenabar peels away are numerous, and no piece of the puzzle is the whole answer. Delectably unpredictable, the film casts Cesar as a spoiled rich kid and then makes us pity him, as he's accused of a crime he has no knowledge of and suffers grave disfigurement in an accident. Stuck in a cell, wearing a mask over his grotesque face, Cesar's only clues are the dreams he keeps having, and boy does he hated-reams! The first half hour is riveting, with an interesting romantic setup giving way to a most bizarre world of shame and denial. In the cell, a psychologist tries to coax information out of Cesar that could help in his trial for murder. From that point on the film is fairly hit-and-miss, though there are many more hits than misses, to be sure.The film's main strengths reside in unaffected acting and sparkling direction. All the leads, from the increasingly desperate psychologist, to Noriega, Cruz and Martinez, are very comfortable even within the strange world the director has placed them in. They do their best to respond as ordinary people to extraordinary situations, as the script pushes them farther and farther. The direction, particularly the cinematography, is solid throughout, with several splendid shots taking advantage of shadows and unusual points of view which always serve a narrative purpose.Clearly the major triumph of the film is in blending the mundane with the bizarre, and the truly bizarre, with such seamless transitions. In fact, this blending becomes a focal point of the plot itself, as it analyzes a cadre of colossal questions such as how we could really tell a dream from reality, or how we might know whether other people really exist. These are weighty questions and the film cannot be faulted for achieving no answers. Rather, it treats them as invisible boundaries the characters bump into, and emphasizes them enough so that the viewer may think about them on their own.Unfortunately, not all the strangeness is wholly original. Slightly reminiscent of The Game and Dark City, and made at the same time as these, Open Your Eyes also evokes standard thriller tricks, such as the scary mirror that changes what it shows each time you look. Though the visual direction maintains our interest, the plot lags at such times; the danger of showing incomprehensible things is that the audience may feel no connection to them. Invoking notions from deja-VI to cryogenics to very subtle commentary on guilt and the unconscious, however, the movie has enough freshness and focus in its own right to work as a cohesive whole.Perhaps the greatest shortcoming, ironically, is in the more mundane setup. Does the audience really care that a spoiled rich kid becomes unattractive and therefore may not be able to steal his best friend's girlfriend? At times, but at others the concept appears a ludicrous source of conflict. The movie is strongest in suggesting how bizarre the world is, or can become, and in this guise it's certainly worth watching. The conclusion poses an interesting choice for a character which, given the pace of technology, may become a real choice within a few centuries. Unlike most movies in its genre, the recent smash The Matrix included, Open Your Eyes finally works because it treats its questions about the world not as a springboard to standard film but as questions worth turning over in their own right.

I must have forgotten that the absolutely terrible Cameron Crowe/Tom Cruise film Vanilla Sky was a remake of this, the original Spanish film, and it is funny that the actress reprised her role as well, but anyway, I was hoping this original version would deserve it's place in the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book. Basically in Madrid, twenty five year old wealthy playboy César (Eduardo Noriega) used to be a good looking young man attractive to women, but now he wears a prosthetic mask due to his hideously disfigured face, he is talking to psychiatrist Antonio (Chete Lera) and telling his story of how he came to be the way he is, in the hope to find some kind of closure. Flashbacks see that at his birthday party he met and flirted with the girlfriend of his best friend Pelayo (Fele Martínez), the beautiful Sofía (Penélope Cruz), he later takes her home, but they do not sleep together, and the next morning his obsessive ex-lover Nuria (Najwa Nimri) spots him leaving her house. Nuria offers César a ride back to her apartment for sex, but on the way she instead intentionally crashes the car to commit suicide, he however survives with the horrible disfigurements that cosmetic surgery cannot solve, Sofía is no longer able to look at him and goes back to Pelayo. Following his disfigurement César has a series of disorienting experiences, including falling asleep drunk in the middle of the street, and when he wakes up he finds that everything is changing for the better, Sofía is claiming now to love him, and surgeons are in fact able to restore his face and good looks, but he finds, when making love to Sofía, she changes into Nuria, he smothers her in panic with a pillow, but everyone claims that the woman he has done it to is in fact named Sofía. He is sent to prison, and while in there bits and pieces of his past come in the form of dreams, he finds out that after he was disfigured he went to Life Extension, a company specialising in cryonics, to preserve a longer, more peaceful and realistic seeming virtual reality of life, in dreams, and returning to their headquarters he finds out they specialise in "artificial perception", where he relives the past when being reborn in the future. When César was drunk on the street, he had in fact committed suicide, and this is the moment he entered cryonic suspension, everything after has been a dream, spliced together with reality and replacing his real memories. The end sees him wanting to wake himself up and be resurrected in the real world, he is convinced the drunken street moment was just a vision created by the company, psychiatrist Antonio tries to convince him he is in the real world, but in the end César leaps off the company's building, hoping he will finally open his eyes and end the fantasy. Also starring Gérard Barray as Duvernois and Jorge De Juan as Encargado L.E. This is a really thought provoking film, I paid absolute attention to everything that was going on because of how fascinating the concept of trying to escape reality and enter a better alternative fantasy was played out, the relationship between Noriega and Cruz is great, the makeup to disfigure Noriega's face is terrific, the murder mystery and twists along the way are clever, and you can recognise the mixes of Eyes without a Face and Vertigo, it is a fantastic psychological thriller. Very good!

There once was a movie called Vanilla Sky. It made very little sense. It really was a thoroughly confusing mess. That movie was an English-language remake of this Spanish-language one. If nothing else Open Your Eyes at least makes more sense than Vanilla Sky did. Oh, there's still plenty of confusing stuff here but director Alejandro Amenábar manages to pull it together much better than Cameron Crowe ever did in the remake. The fact that I think the story makes much more sense when presented in a language I don't even understand is about as damning a statement as can be made about Crowe's film. Open Your Eyes is clearly the better film of the two. But it comes with its own frustrations. Maybe this story was just a little too convoluted to ever make a thoroughly enjoyable movie out of.Open Your Eyes is a movie which delights in messing with your mind. This is a movie which demands that you be fully engaged when watching it. Turn off your brain and start daydreaming and you'll be lost. The movie's main character, César, has plenty of disorienting experiences which can leave the viewer feeling more than a little disoriented himself. It's a hard movie to pin down. It flashes back and forth in time, it raises questions about what is real and what is imagined. It takes you right inside César's head. Unfortunately César's darned near lost his mind so going inside his head isn't going to give us much clarity.It's best to not say much about the plot because whatever joy you get from this movie will likely come from your attempts to unravel the plot for yourself. If you've already seen Vanilla Sky you unfortunately pretty much know everything. The ending of Vanilla Sky was such a letdown, and made so little sense whatsoever, that as you watch Open Your Eyes you can't help but have very low expectations. You're waiting to be let down and to be thoroughly baffled. Happily Amenábar's ending is a little more focused than Crowe's was. Where Vanilla Sky went completely off the rails Open Your Eyes takes some strange twists and turns but you can follow along if you try. The movie asks you for some serious suspension of disbelief but at least it doesn't throw so much stuff at you that it becomes utter nonsense like Vanilla Sky did. Give some credit to Eduardo Noriega whose performance in the lead role of César is much stronger than Tom Cruise's corresponding star turn in the remake. And this movie's Penélope Cruz also comes across much better than that movie's Penélope Cruz. Strange how the same actress playing the same role can be so much better in one movie than in the other. Maybe it's her comfort level with the language, maybe it's just that she's surrounded by a better movie than she was in Vanilla Sky. Open Your Eyes is not a great movie, a little too convoluted for its own good. Somewhat slow, not always as dramatic and engaging as you would hope. But all in all the movie does have an intriguing story which, if you can wrap your head around it, makes the movie worth seeing. For whatever flaws the movie may have you can understand what Crowe saw in it. Too bad he made such a mess of it when he got his hands on it.