‘Open your eyes’: Amenábar remedy 25 years later the biggest mistake of his film

The picture of Edward Noriega Desperate on a completely deserted Gran Vía in Madrid is one of the most powerful in Spanish cinema. For that reason it was firmly impregnated in the popular imagination and there were not a few who remembered Open your eyes when talking about the streets that were left empty in big cities during the lockdowns of the pandemic.

With those images still flashing on our retinas, it could be said that Open your eyes It has celebrated its 25th anniversary being more relevant and remembered than ever. The second length of Alejandro Amenabar can be seen on the platform FlixOlé, where it also appears restored and with the correction of a mistake that had been tormenting its most observant viewers for a quarter of a century.

The aforementioned Gran Vía sequence, which was shot in a hurry in the early hours of August 15, 1996 (ten months before the rest of the film) because it was the only time permission was obtained from the Madrid City Council to cut the circulation of one of the most important roads of the city, impacts by its image of emptiness. But that emptiness was never total: On a balcony, to the right of the image, it was possible to see two curious figures leaning out.

Never more again. As has been commented on social networks, the copy of Open your eyes which is already available on FlixOlé doesn’t have that spontaneous foray into behind-the-scenes reality that made a small scratch in the situation posed by the fiction.

Consulted by CINEMANIA, from FlixOlé they confirm that the version found on the platform has been restored by its own laboratories, under the supervision of Alejandro Amenábar. Moment for which he took the opportunity to digitally erase the intruders. “It was he himself who wanted to remove those two people from the balcony,” they say from the laboratory. “Furthermore, not only were those two people erased, but there were other ‘onlookers’ that appeared on other balconies and were also erased.”

now you can see Open your eyes just as that sequence was conceived: with the Gran Vía empty except for the character of Eduardo Noriega. Even emptier than ever before.

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‘Open your eyes’: Amenábar remedy 25 years later the biggest mistake of his film