Oh it's beautiful but, the story line ? Oh the story is intermangled.

Rating: Null/10 (22 November 2006)

I agree with what this person said so I copied and put it here as my comment. Kinda like what most established Screenwriters do when Writers send in Treatments and Screenplays to an Agent who pawns it off to those established screenwriter's. Yeah, their best ideas get extracted and used in someone else's work:
"the plot structure wasn't as cohesive as it could've been. the intermingling of time dimensions is nothing new, however for this movie it was abit jumpy and required the audience more effort in deciphering it's flow rather than enjoying a good story. The visuals were stunning awesome but didn't lend any true significance to the storyline. as a special effect it's cool, but there was no solid relevance to the story. for instance, with bullet-time and frame freezing there is relevance with what is going on in the scene and how it works as a function of the movies story and plot. Whereas in "Fountain" all you get is beautiful imagery with music that doesn't particularly drive the story forward. It's non-functional imagery. But that's okay, I enjoyed it. However for a movie, no, I can see where this sound and imagery would be really cool with some fine Columbian Gold and a water bong ! 3 stories, 3 time dimension, is a worn out idea. however it works for this "movie" sort of.
When I watched it( 4 hours ago ) I caught the Holiday Season crowd, so a lot of people were already giddy. Wolverine was easier chuckled at or hissed at depending on what type of emotion he was trying to evoke. I thought he was doing well since I didn't get to see the last X-men movie. People still look at him as Wolverine so that kinda ruined it for them. Rachel was immaculate in her acting, and if it wasn't for her, the movie wouldn't have much substance. I mean her acting was excellent. Some of the visuals made no sense and were quite distracting. It's almost as if the Director has all these fantastic ideas in front of him and didn't know what to do, so he just through them all together with no concern as to how they'd make sense.
The movie is better viewed as an Art piece like most viewers have already said. So, this is not a movie in the traditional sense, but tries to be one. Actually, I was bored and thought the visuals provided some thought provocation, the story line was not cohesive enough to drive any meaningful point that I already couldn't decipher from a few lines of dialog or a still image.
I figure the screenwriter needed more time with the content. this movie had so much potential but it seemed thrown together without any refining. And, indeed, it needs a lot of refining to be considered seriously. therefore, I conclude that "the fountain" is no "The Matrix" but it was a good try for the Director in trying to do something different. " - someone else's words.
Thank you, JQ