2. Vanilla Sky
Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky is another film that's mostly fascinating but fails to bring things to a close in a satisfactory manner, unlike the original film upon which it is based, Open Your Eyes. Though certainly ambitious in its construction, this inferior effort less tantalises with its blending of dreams and reality but instead just bemuses and transfixes. While Crowe tries to craft a unique love story, he loses himself and fails to get a proper handle on his complex vision, particularly pertaining to the surreal glimpses we get of David's (Tom Cruise) seemingly comatose brain. Once the reveal is made that we are experiencing David's memories spliced with real life, the script really fails to do justice to the source material, blasting through the beats too quickly instead of just stopping to explain things. As a result, the finale, in which David decides to take a leap of faith off the top of a building, isn't nearly as satisfying as in the original film, which explained itself throughout far better.