A travesty of epic proportions

Rating: 3/10 (23 September 2017)

This film will undoubtedly go down in history as an exercise in both your patience and tolerance for pretentious, self-indulgent crap. This is exactly what I imagine a vanity project to look like, where a director writes a script as he is surrounded by Yes Men, all exalting his every word. "You are a Genius", they screamed, as they held the finished script up to the heavens, "You are the greatest visionary cinema has ever seen!". And Aronofsky saw that it was good.
This is what I imagine was going through this egomaniacs mind as he wrote this abomination. This movie is the end result of not understanding your own creative output, not having a filter, not having an editor that will call you out on your B.S., and not having a crew that will smell a stinker as they were working on one.
Not a single person stopped him and said, "This isn't good, Darren. This is needlessly obtuse, grotesquely realized, and lacking any real semblance of narrative and true storytelling. Your allegories and metaphors were either blatantly heavy handed, or ambiguous, and your symbolism was obscure but added nothing of value to the overall film. It's not your best work, Darren. I think you should rethink this." I would have been that crew member, especially if I cared about what I was attaching my name to. But this is Hollywood, where millionaire's tell me about social injustice while they drive their hundred thousand dollar cars to their gated communities, away from the people they swear they care about. I really can't expect much from professional liars, and this movie just proves that Hollywood is running rampant with a degenerate disease that is stiffing creativity, passion and craft, instead politicizing everything, virtue signaling, and attempting to inject social commentary where none is welcomed.
Darren, I love your movies. I was there day one for Requiem and for Fountain, and I LOVED Black Swan with a passion usually reserved for Asian films. But this movie, this failure of Biblical proportions is not only the worst thing you have ever done, but it quite possibly the worst film I have seen all year. Humble yourself, man. You are a respected auteur in a field rife with paint-by-numbers movies, created by committee. Your films illicit feelings of great love for the craft, and create fans of cinema as a whole. But you have to reel yourself in, or hire people who will. You cannot surround yourself with people who will offer nothing but praise, much like the character Him in this movie. You are not God, you are not a god, you are just a man. And like any man, it takes a great failure to bring you down from flying too close to the sun. Learn from this, and never repeat this farce of a film. You, nor I, deserve any of this.
FYI; I gave the movie 3 stars, because despite all else, the movie was breathtaking to look at. Seriously, the cinematography was the only thing this movie had going for it. There was a mouse in the theater that I found infinitely more entertaining that this movie.