Abre los ojos - 1997

1997 so this came first, and Vanilla Sky is the remake. Well, it's incredible how identical the movies are, but this one is better because there is everything I liked but it lacks everything I did not like. Only thing I liked more in Vanilla Sky is Cameron Diaz. I'm not a big fan, but she's good, very good, and in her performance I could clearly see how in love she was and how she was suffering, and I felt sorry for her at the party, but here I didn't feel all that, actually I found this Nuria character more scary than sad, more psychopath than heartbroken. Everything else was better here. Well, I liked Tom Cruise, sure, but I also liked Eduardo Noriega here as César.
The movie starts with César and Nuria waking up, with him leaving her and going out to an empty city: a dream. There's César talking to the psychiatrist in his cell (this was definitely a cell, I don't know where Cruise's character was), with his mask on. César's friend Pelayo (Fele Martinez) goes to his birthday party with Sofia (Penelope Cruz), a normal, pretty girl without all the silliness in the other film. Sofia is cute and funny and César won't leave her alone. Basically the same lines in both films:  same scenes, same words, it was unbelievable.
César takes her home, they chat, they watch tv, they have a lovely time together, and he's in love.
He goes home in the morning, and out of her house he meets Nuria, who tells him she wants to have sex with him and have fun, but he refuses. She asks if he's afraid and he accepts.
...
Really? Does this really work?? You say 'are you afraid?' and that's enough to make any man do what he doesn't want to do?? Please tell me it's not.
Anyway.
She takes some drugs, then asks him what happiness is, she tells him she's happy when she's with him and that it's sad that he doesn't know anything about her, only her first name, but he seems totally uninterested, and then she speeds up and crashes her car and dies.
Like in the other movie there's the dream with Sofia, the very disfigured face after he woke up from the coma caused by the accident, the meeting with the doctors, the mask...
and then he really meets her, she works as a mime at a park. He talks to her, kind of aggressive, like 'how do you think I am? You didn't even call'. She was definitely uncomfortable, but in the end she accepts a date with him. Looking at her, it seems like she didn't want to hurt him.
The night of the date there's Pelajo too, who tells César to take off the mask he put on, but he replies it is a protection against infections...Pelajo doesn't buy it, they argue, César moves away from them and starts drinking and watching them talk or dance. When César goes back to her, he's completely drunk which makes her even more uncomfortable. They all go out, but Sofia just wants to be left alone and go home, so they all go their own way.
It's unbelievable how identical the two films are, but here the bar scene was not so long.
Everything was the same: César living happily with Sofia until he starts seeing Nuria everywhere and ends up killing Sofia believing her to be already-dead Nuria, until he realizes this is all a dream, he killed himself and had his body crionized or whatever, so it was his own brain that created all that mess. Years have passed, everything's changed, and now he can wake up and be alive again, but in a world without Sofia or anyone he ever knew because they're long gone.
With Cameron Diaz's performance it would have been just great.