At the risk of losing whatever little credibility I have in the dark and obscure circles of amateur film critique, I am going to come out and say that Tom Cruise is an interesting actor to watch. I am not going to go as far as Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian who stated that he is a brilliant character actor and a great actor, but I think Tom Cruise deserves more credit than he usually gets. His off-screen antics have gotten in the way of people’s fair appraisal of his acting talents. And while these are still limited (I noticed years ago that one of his favourite methods for acting surprise and disbelief is to repeat his lines twice, a la Jimmy Two Times), he is nonetheless able to sometimes deliver some exciting performances as he did in Born on the 4th of July (1989), Magnolia (1999), and Lions for Lambs (2007).

In Vanilla Sky, based on the better Spanish film called Open your Eyes (1997), Cruise shows that he is not afraid to be a bit more edgy, although, in all fairness, we are still talking about a Cameron Crowe film. The first half of the film is artificial and annoying, depicting mostly an exasperating romance between a rich and vain playboy played by Cruise and a Euro artsy-fartsy girl played by the other Cruz, Penelope (whose acting charisma only seems to come out whenever she is not playing in an American film). This hollow yarn appears to have been taken over the top deliberately (I hope) to provide a starker contrast to the second half. Cameron Diaz’ scenes offer the only interesting moments until the film kicks into second gear, at which point Cruise starts to let loose and takes us into darker and edgier territory.

Attention Spoilers Ahead
The reason I enjoyed Vanilla Sky is not because I thought it would be interesting to be the only person in the world who does. Rather, it is because it deals with a subject matter rarely encountered in cinema, at least in mainstream cinema: using technology to defeat death. This is the story of a dead man who has used his wealth to be preserved cryogenically until, at some point in the future, technological progress will allow for his body to be brought back to life. Now, this would make for a pretty boring film if this man were not able to continue ‘living’ in a simulated world that feels exactly like reality. Is it not clear how exactly the technology to enable a dying person to upload his mind into a perfect virtual reality has come to exist so quickly before the technology to keep one alive after a particular car crash…but who cares, it still allows for some interesting speculations, provided that one enjoys thinking about such things.

Cryonics may still seem like the stuff of Science Fiction to most people, but several companies today offer such services, although without the mind uploading bit which I suspect will take a while longer to develop, and their mastery of the process is improving every year. For around 120,000 dollars one can get his body preserved with the hope that some future technology, probably nano-based, will be able to bring that body back to life, along, somehow and hopefully, with the consciousness that used to accompany it. This may not be as crazy as it sounds. Rapid and mind-boggling advances related to what are known as the GRIN technologies (Genetics, Robotic & Cognitive, Information Systems and Nanotechnology) are reshaping the health and socio-political landscape of our society on an exponential scale. What we have achieved technologically in the past is only a fraction of what we will achieve in the future. According to Ray Kurzweil, who believes in the coming of The Singularity, the exponential increase in technological advancement that our world is witnessing means that we will not experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century. Instead, we will experience ‘20,000 years of progress, or about 100 thousand times greater than what was achieved in the 20th century’ (Kurzweil. The Singularity is Near. 2005). At this rate, who knows what will be possible in 500 or 2000 years. Therefore, no one can say for sure today that reviving the frozen dead will not be possible in the future. Personally, I see no reason to doubt that it will happen. My concerns are more based around the difficulty of bringing back a person’s consciousness. What would be the point of coming back if one has no recollection of the past and of one’s self? Traditional reincarnation can already provide for this, so Cryonics, or a field working in association with it, need to go beyond and allow one to preserve his or her self throughout the ages. But memory implants, mind uploading or a yet-to-be-thought-about technology should overcome this obstacle, leaving only ethicists, sociologists and politicians to debate the pros and cons and the impact of such a massive revolution on society as a whole.

Vanilla Sky is not a great film. It is probably not even a good film. But I found it very entertaining nonetheless and the possibilities associated with keeping one’s mind and thoughts alive in a simulation of the real world until that person’s body can be brought back to life, left me thinking and wondering.