this year's eternal sunshine...

Rating: 8/10 (13 October 2006)

Every year there are being released a few art house movies that have a very big potential: a story with several dimensions and every time you watch it you see the movie from a different perspective. Often they have a poetic beauty and are visually stunning. Eternal sunshine was one of those and this year's there another one...
I was fortunate to see "the fountain" at the gent international film festival (belgium) in the presence of director Darren Aronofsky. In his speech he told he wanted to make a new kind of science fiction movie. No laser guns and stuff like that, but beautiful, poetic images of space...
The movie tells the story of a couple: Isabelle(Izzy) & tom. Izzy has a tumor and Tom is a scientist who's trying to find an antidote against dead. This is one of the three stories. The second one is the story Izzy's writing: the fountain (which explains the title) and the third one shows us tom as a space explorer in the 26th century. They're all connected to each other and deal with questions about life & dead, the reason of existence...
It's no ordinary science fiction movie, but a poetic tribute about love, dead & existence. Sometimes it's surrealistic and then it reminded me a bit of eternal sunshine.
Conclusion: The fountain is a wonderful movie that leaves you more questions than it answers. Every time you'll watch it, you'll get another dimension of it. There'll definitely be loads of people who'll hate this movie, to those people: stay away! But if you're in for a poetic, visually stunning and intelligent film then this is your movie!