Awake Review

Awake is a film based on the frightening statistic that every year, 700 people experience a phenomenon known as anesthetic awareness where they are completely conscious but unable to respond to the outside world. This movie stars Hayden Christensen as main character Clay Beresford, Jessica Alba, Terrence Howard, and Lena Olin.

Christensen's character Clay is an affluent, young man who is romantically connected to Sam Lockwood, played by the beautiful Jessica Alba. Clay is on borrowed time, inflicted with a serious heart condition that pressures him to accelerate his life while trying to find a suitable donor. His mother Lilith (Olin) is a classy woman who has the best board-certified surgeon lined up to do the procedure for her son. Partially defiant from resentment and gulit of his father's passing, Clay has chosen his own surgeon to do the procedure, Dr. Jack Harper (Howard), who was there for him when he experienced his first symptoms. As the story unfolds, the audience is taken through his personal life, leading up to the high-risk, yet not-so-realistic surgery (could be that I see surgery everyday that I didn't buy the tough skin and muscle layers). That's when the horror rears its ugly head. So as not to ruin the film, the rest is for you to watch.

Awake has key components of a suspenseful drama/thriller, yet there were a few points in the movie where they puff you up for a really good scene, and then deflate you with strange twists and turns. You feel for this guy because he can't vocalize his pain to the surgeons, yet it is drawn out for so long that the anesthesia awareness becomes secondary to a much scarier realization. I would have probably enjoyed the movie more if Clay's procedure was completed and the remainder of the movie focuses on a battle between his word and the doctors. But the writers took it in a totally different direction, which was still entertaining and riveting, but not what I had expected.

This film touches on a couple of controversial points-- one being spiritual, the other ethical. The director presented death very candidly--no bright light, white robes or angels singing; just bleak and instant, hold the bells and whistles. What I enjoyed the most about this film was the fact that it exposed the erroneous nature of medicine. Until medicine evolves to robots doing quadruple bypass surgery with Rolex sweeping-hand precision or endoscopic procedures using laser beams to rid the body of cancers, there is always the human error factor. We fool ourselves into thinking that someone is intelligent, trustworthy, and dignified because he or she wears a coat that signifies just that. But in reality, we are all human and with that comes the possibility of error. In summation, I give this movie a generous fours stars. Awake stirs the brain cells with the scarier thought of the medical world and how vulnerable we are under the scalpel of the surgeon.