The Fountain

cinemasauron4.0

It's about life. It's about death. It's about love. It's about loss. It's about desire. It's about obsession. It's about mortality. It's about eternity. It's about spirituality. It's about duality. It's philosophical. It's symbolic. It's artistic. It's pretentious. It's unique. It's flawed. No matter what your opinion about The Fountain is, there is no denying that it is a singularly stimulating experience.On the surface, this sci-fi saga is a quest of one man's thousand years struggle to save the very woman he loves and although the plot is quite complex for some viewers to follow, it eventually holds up well over repeated viewings. The story follows three parallel plotlines spanning over a thousand years, each set in a different timeline & carefully intertwined, but having the same purpose & pace in its journey from darkness to light.The way director Darren Aronofsky has enveloped all of it into a central theme is very impressive but when it comes to the script, he could've done away with some of the unnecessarily added complexities without crippling the film in any manner. Cinematography is undeniably gorgeous while editing seamlessly transitions us from one storyline to another & keeps the pace of all three timelines constant to provide a more streamlined flow.Coming to the performances, Hugh Jackman & Rachel Weisz each play three different sets of characters possessing same souls in their respective timelines and, for the major part of the film, balanced each other pretty well. Clint Mansell delivers again with yet another outstanding soundtrack, arguably his best work to date, which has a central theme to it just like the film's story & is at its finest during the film's climactic moments.Yes, it is slow-paced. Yes, every frame of it is layered with themes, symbolism & motifs. And yes, it demands a lot of attention from its viewers and isn't for everyone. But if you're still willing to invest in it, you're halfway through to discovering something truly wonderful. On an overall scale, The Fountain is Darren Aronofsky's flawed masterpiece but a masterpiece nonetheless and someday, it will have the respect it truly deserves.

DirkH4.0

There is a lot wrong with this film. Its script is unnecessarily convoluted and it confuses in order to hide a flawed narrative. It hops and skips too often and in doing so tries to over complicate the simplicity of the story.And I could not care less about all that.This is one of the most beautiful visual representations of loss, grief, spirituality and obsession I've ever seen. Aronofsky manages to find an impressive balance between subtle imagery and bombastic splendour. He thus accompanies the main characters' search for acceptance of loss, travel through grief and pursuit of redemption.The raw emotion, captured in the guise of a stunning Jackman, is what resonates most within me. He is the common thread that runs though everything, linked to different interpretations of his wife, his quest and his faith in himself and in life.A flawed masterpiece is still a masterpiece and for me this film just refuses to lessen its impact and doesn't want to loosen its grip.

Darren Carver-Balsiger2.0

Mild spoilers, but the film isn't worth watching anyway.Looking through my friend's ratings, I anticipate some people will disagree massively with my review. Sorry!What a bunch of nonsense. The Fountain isn't even enjoyable nonsense, it's just overindulgent and boring. I'm not a fan of Darren Aronofsky's films, although I gave a few some generous ratings in my teenage years. Watching The Fountain just solidified my issues with his films. It thinks it's so deep, touching upon some universal truth regarding love and death, and it just isn't. Evoking Christianity and other religions is a cheap trick, a way to add pseudo-philosophy by name-dropping something spiritual. Luckily Aronofsky doesn't seem to run out of other gimmicky motifs which he can sprinkle around The Fountain and pretend they mean something.When you get past all this shallow, faux-deep bullshit, The Fountain reduces down to a tacky love story. What's worse is that the love story makes the film centre on the present day, which is by far the least interesting of the film's three settings (past, present, future). It doesn't help that the female love interests are depicted as weak, dependent on a man, and surrounded by white virginal imagery. Literally, the film boils down to a woman dying so that a man can feel sad about it and mope around for three separate lifetimes. Isn't love so beautiful when a woman painfully dies just so her husband can learn about death and become immortal?Darren Aronofsky, a director who has incidentally mastered the art of the obnoxious close-up, is such an irritating filmmaker. Reading his pretentious comments about The Fountain has retroactively made me like the film less. He talks about how he designed the film to be open to interpretation but have only one correct solution, and how he wanted to make the next 2001. He also complained about the negative reviews, saying "many, many people don't want to think about [death]". Here's a thought: maybe those who dislike The Fountain don't dislike it because they're scared of thinking about sad things (how patronising), but because its writer-director didn't seem to put much thought into his shallow-as-fuck 2001 homage. Do you know what filmmakers who've made genuinely deep films don't need to do? Tell people they've made deep films that are open to interpretation.The Fountain is a bore, and an irritating bore at that. It has positives - Hugh Jackman seems to be trying, the final few scenes are a relatively interesting kind of mindfuck - but overall The Fountain is a jumbled mess. It's obnoxious, reliant on a really terrible central love story, and uninteresting until the final few minutes. Not good.------------EDIT (23/06/2023): The above review was written many years ago. For the sake of transparency, I have not changed a word. I still think The Fountain is a bad film, but I would like to acknowledge that I think my writing here was harshly written and overly personal. This is not the sort of review I would write today.