Issue date: 12/4/07 Section: Aggielife

Media Credit: File - The Battalion Hayden Christensen, Terrence Howard and Jessica Alba star in Awake, a tale of a man who experiences anesthetic awareness during a heart transplant surgery. [Click to enlarge]

Thousands of people go under the knife every day. Whether it's a simple wisdom tooth removal or something as complex and dangerous as a heart transplant, millions of people have had some sort of surgical procedure performed on them at one time or another. With the aid of general anesthesia, the pain associated with these procedures is completely bypassed - in most cases. For an unlucky few, a condition known as anesthetic awareness takes place, a condition in which the paralysis agent of the anesthesia has worked, but the comatose agent has not. This terrifying concept is the subject of first-time director Joby Harold's Awake.

Clayton Beresford (Hayden Christensen) is on top of the world. He and his mother (Lena Olin) run a multi-million dollar corporation, and he is set to marry his sweetheart, Sam (Jessica Alba). But Clayton has a very severe heart condition that will preclude his living much longer. In order to prolong his life for as long as possible, Clayton must receive a heart transplant. The surgery is to be performed by his close friend Jack (Terrence Howard). But as Clayton is slipping into the grips of anesthesia, he realizes something terrifying: he's not fully anesthetized. He is paralyzed, but he can still hear and feel everything - and what he hears and feels in the operating room is disturbing.

While most research on the subject reveals that the film is grossly inaccurate in its depiction of anesthetic awareness and the number of people it affects, the film is nonetheless a well-made psycho-thriller. The first half hour of the movie is somewhat mired by seemingly no direction and more than a few clichés - both cinematically and in regard to dialogue - but after that the story really picks up. The film doesn't seem too preoccupied with anything more than what audiences have already seen in the film's trailers. While some mild ambiguity at first obscures narrative orientation, the film is not particularly hard to follow.

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