pretty freaking' ambitious!

Rating: 8/10 (31 January 2007)

Some hate this movie. It happens these days when the ambitions of a filmmaker, in this case Darren Aronofsky soar above the crap that Hollywood poops out. H. Jackman portrays a medical researcher trying to stop a brain tumor from killing his wife (the lovely Rachel Weisz). He's also playing a sixteenth-century Spanish explorer on a quest for Queen Isabel (Weisz again) to discover the Tree of Life. And he plays a twenty-sixth-century astronaut. In telling a tale of love across time, Aronofsky is sometimes guilty of creating arty, pretentious psycho- silly stuff. But in aesthetic terms, he's trying to explore really raw stuff. I like the intention here. This is a movie worth seeing.