(2001) "Can you tell the difference between dreams and reality?" Dr McCabe (Kurt Russell) asks David Aames Jr (Tom Cruise, an inspired choice for this part), wearing a mask while sitting inside a prison cell. In life most people pursue a dream, but in a living dream one may pursue a life. "The subconscious is a very powerful thing," Rebecca Dearborn (Tilda Swinton) reiterates Dr McCabe's words, demonstrating the possibility (through science and entertainment) of resurrection into an ageless state.

In his remake of Open Your Eyes, retaining Penélope Cruz to reprise her role as Sofia Serrano, director/screenwriter Cameron Crowe eliminates much of the alluring ambiguity in the script by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil, making his version far more explicit and self-explanatory than the original. You'll have about as much difficulty figuring out the differences between dreams and reality, temporary disfigurement and derangement, by the conclusion as you will over distinguishing the two Camerons and Cruise/Cruz in a "true moment of choice."

A wealthy, handsome, pleasure player, David has inherited his father's publishing empire; his parents were killed ten years earlier in a car crash on New Year's Eve. The opening scene is an aerial view above New York City (David has a fear of heights) before the bedside clock's wakeup message in the voice of his friend and sometimes bed-partner Juliana Gianni (Cameron Diaz) repeatedly coos: "Open your eyes."

After getting up from an empty bed, he drives a Porsche into Times Square, only to find it completely deserted. Waking from this nightmare, which he describes to McCabe, he gets out from bed where Julie is sleeping, leaving her with instructions before driving in his Mustang to pick up his friend Brian Shelby (Jason Lee), a novelist with a book contract (thanks to David), for a game of racquetball.

"But one day you'll know what love truly is," predicts Brian, who wistfully refers to Julie as his dream girl: "It's the sour and the sweet. I know sour, which allows me to appreciate the sweet." They have a close brush with death in traffic.

In the cell, charged with murder, David, refusing to remove his mask, even though McCabe assures him his face is no longer disfigured, accuses the board of directors (whom he characterizes as the Seven Dwarfs) of having put him there. His father's loyal lawyer Thomas Tipp (Timothy Spall) has previously implied as much that the board needs to prove he's mentally unstable in order to wrench away his 51% control of the company.

During his 33rd birthday party, David's introduced to Brian's date Sofia (whom he'd just met at the library), upon whom David fastens his charming fascination (ignoring Brian), at the same time Julie, uninvited, stalks, attempting to seduce him. Escaping upstairs with Sofia, David shows her his private study with an original Monet-painted vanilla-sky canvas.

Distraught over losing his girl to David, Brian, inebriated, goes home alone; David escorts Sofia to her apartment where they sketch drawings of each other (hers a caricature of him, his a flattering portrait of her). Admitting to her that until this night he'd been snowboarding through life without focus, David also confesses to McCabe: "I dug her completely." For the first time in his life "true love seemed possible."

On the sofa with Sofia, David languidly watches a TV program about cryonization, featuring Raymond Tooley, author of Life: The Sequel, and his company Life Expansion, along with the amazing dog Benny, who after being frozen for three months was fully revived.

As he's leaving Sofia's flat, David's met by Julie in her car, offering him a ride (though he has his own vehicle) ostensibly to make up for the previous evening. As she recklessly weaves through traffic, she asks him: "What's happiness to you, David?" Then, angrily explaining her deep disappointment in his treating her carelessly - when sleeping with someone, one's body in effect makes a promise - she questions: "Do you believe in God?" Rapidly accelerating, the car crashes through a barrier and over a bridge.

In a park David tells Sofia of the horrible nightmare with a suicidal driver: "I can't wake up." Following three and a half weeks in a coma, his arm shattered and his face a wreck, David comes back to life like Benny the dog. He suffers terrible headaches; his dreams are cruel, taunting pranks.

After multiple reconstructive facial surgeries, leaving David with a ghastly scarred phizog, Dr Pomeranz proffers a facial prosthetic until something better can be done. David finally re-emerges from his isolation to candidly face Sofia in her dance studio; putting on the facial shield, he later meets Sofia with Brian in a nightclub, where she answers the drunk, disfigured David's question with the memorable line: "I'll tell you in another life when we are both cats."

Outside after Sofia and then Brian depart (though David thinks they've left him to rendezvous), David passes out on the sidewalk. He wakes to Sofia's whispering to him: "Open your eyes."

In the cell with Dr McCabe, David agonizes: "Everything's a nightmare!" Yet again reassuring David that the doctors employed a new form of reconstructive surgery to fix his face ("Take off the mask"), the psychologist, attempting to discover an entry point into David's thoughts and motives ("Open the door") in advance of his trial, demands to know who "Ellie" is, a name David had been crying out during his sleep.

Paranoid, David says he's too suspicious to let happiness in without a full-body search. "Is this a dream?" Sofia asks him when she sees his face is fully reformed as before. On a cold, rainy morning they stroll arm-in-arm down a street like Dylan with Suze Rotolo on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan; she is his savior, his Catherine to his Jules from Jules and Jim.

Later Truffaut's Jim in the person of Brian ("I was your only friend") says: "You're in O.J. land, man." In bed with Sofia, David, getting up to go into the bathroom for a drink of water, turns on the light and looks at another nightmare in the mirror. Waking from that recurring horror, he again goes into the bathroom; but when he returns to bed, Julie is under the covers.

Wondering if someone really has been playing a trick on David, Dr McCabe repeatedly asks about his having mentioned a man in a restaurant (later identified as Edmund Ventura with Lucid Dreams) who approached David to say he need only calm down to take control of his life again.

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