However, Christensen’s filmography is full of other interesting non-Star Wars titles as well. There’s Shattered Glass, for example, which tells the true story of a journalist caught lying to craft more compelling stories for readers. Then there’s Awake, a horror thriller film that’s one of the most underrated in Christensen’s career.
Awake’s Terrifying Premise
Awake follows the story of Clay Beresford, a young man born to a wealthy family, who undergoes a serious medical procedure (a heart transplant) and is given anesthesia. Everything goes smoothly until Christensen wakes up in the middle of the procedure, yet is still paralyzed.
While lying there unable to move a muscle, Beresford begins to learn that he can’t trust everyone around him, and that a sinister plot is in place that means to do him harm. It leaves him as the most vulnerable of leading protagonists, where his life is being actively threatened, but he’s unable to do anything about it.
The terrifying nature of this premise is that what Beresford goes through is a legitimate medical phenomenon which may interest fans of popular television medical dramas. It’s called anesthetic awareness, and it’s when someone is given anesthesia before surgery but then wakes up, unable to move or speak. The film plays on this realism, bringing suspense to the proceedings.
Awake Gives Hayden Christensen A Very Different Kind Of Role
Awake came out after the release of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, during the time that Christensen was on his hiatus from the franchise. The actor went 17 years before reprising his role as Anakin/Darth Vader, next appearing in Obi-Wan Kenobi (and then went on to join the Ahsoka series and the upcoming season 2).
In Awake, Hayden Christensen plays a very different type of character than his Star Wars one. For one, the world is entirely different. Rather than being surrounded by spaceships and aliens, Christensen is here in a much more grounded tale. Everything here is grounded in a sense of realism, as opposed to Star Wars, which thrives in its heightened storytelling.
Beresford himself is also very different from Anakin/Vader. Not only is his world distinct from the Star Wars galaxy, but he’s also less anger-fueled, lacking that evil cutting edge that Anakin develops throughout the course of the prequel trilogy.