It's become something of a cliché in recent times for the modern remake to undergo minor facial surgery and emerge with a slightly more contemporary tweak and a glossier exterior. We've had the 're-imagining' of Burton's Planet of the Apes, Gus Van Sant's 'recreation' of Psycho and now Cameron Crowe tackles Amenabar's 'Abres Los Ojos', dubbing his spin on the identity piece, a 'cover version'; the original acoustic, his rock. The funny thing is that what most musical artists need when strumming acoustically is the bare-bones of a memorable melody, the tricks, dalliances and frills of a polished pop number diminished to the bare essential's. Well, Crowe's film seems to be nothing but that. An interesting, even invigorating concept with nothing but empty, vogueish frills to appease the type of audience that typically go and see a film starring Tom Cruise. This substance analogy is perfectly accompanied by the lead, all mile-wide smile, but nothing beyond this. Tom Cruise is a limited actor but needs the correct part, and this certainly isn't a role tailor-made for his charismatic yet inane personality. One can only imagine what the likes of Nicholson, Penn or Harris may have made of this in their prime.

The cover version comparison also reminds me of the howling critics who seem to forget that rather than being an act of supreme sacrilege which robs the song of everything, covers are still the same high quality song, regardless of artist. So this made me think if Cameron Crowe's efforts (so close to the original) could actually be that bad with such strong source material. Unfortunately, the cover song can also have no soul, no real essence and a complete absence of that special something that made the original so good. And Crowe falls headfirst into this category.

This film reminded me in large parts of Mulholland Drive. It's a mysterious identity thriller set around a largely distorted modern world of mass finance, involving the audience in the intricacies of the protagonist's mental state. However, MD and VS seem to be almost polar opposites in their virtues and weaknesses. Whereas Mulholland Drive could do with some meatiness and some genuinely revelatory and powerful passages, that is all Vanilla Sky has, in superficial droves. The film is all surface, from the empty stylistics, to the clumsy symbolism, through the achingly trendy yet faceless musical selections (you got the feeling that Cameron Crowe wanted to show the world his wonderful CD collection. Radiohead (check), Sigur Ros (check), REM (check), Leftfield...) and staining the forced and trite dialogue spouting from the mouths of these oh-so fake people. What Crowe doesn't seem to realise is that there is so much more to film (and its world) than things that the naked eye and ear can pick-up. Such pleasures as atmosphere, resonance, sensations, feelings, evocations and so on. His film is barely skin-deep and this is unacceptable coming from a psychological thriller of overwrought attempted poignancy and insight. It's not that I didn't care for this characters (but why should I? Cruise is just a jerk who gets worse as the film progresses), I simply could not believe in them and the world they inhabited. Therefore, the predicaments and scenarios just felt like elaborate charades.

If these characters are two-dimensional though, the way they interact is anything but one-dimensional. The supposed intensity and allure of Cruise and Cruz, the smartass buddy banter of Lee and Cruise and so on is not only instantly forgettable, it is all for show, none of it helping to put a tone or feel to this already messy film. On the plus side Cameron Diaz is as fine as ever in an underwritten role, injecting the kind of human urgency and failings the film should really have spent more time on, and Penelope Cruz is nowhere near as inept as we're lead to believe. These actresses only hint at what splendours we could have seen. We have this interesting subtext about the subjective nature of aesthetics, and this goes nowhere. A study of a mind unable to transcend its own faults. A thriller in which the truth lies inside a character so messed up he may never unearth it. Instead we have a half-baked identity crisis that has none of the claustrophobia, complexity, surrealism and nightmarish elements that pretty much any director one can think of, may have utilised: Cronenberg, Godard, Polanksi, Lynch, Coppola, Frankenheimer, McNaughton, Friedkin... It would seem that Cameron Crowe would not know what abstraction was if a man wearing nothing but bacon espadrilles and cocktail stick nipple-rings filled with skewered exotic fishes came and danced about it on his face.

I ended up thinking that all the lush photography, artfully composed sequences and plot twists are nothing if you only have a threadbare ideology in the place of genuine depth and provocation. The way Crowe felt it more essential to namecheck the likes of Truffaut and Capra rather than lead us deeper and darker into the maze was disconcerting. Smelled like a director out of his depth, drowning not waving