A simplified take of "The Fountain"

Rating: 8/10 (14 October 2009)

First of all excuse me for not being an eloquent writer like most here (I have some language disabilities) and this is my first "review."
Not till the last scene of the movie did it really hit me what I just witnessed. I've only watched the movie once so there maybe some small things I missed. Simply put the movie is about a young woman (Isabel) dying of terminal brain cancer, she knows she is dying and accepts her fate with grace, and ease, but her loving husband Tommy, a research doctor in the field, can not accept the inevitable her passing. Isabel as she is coming to grips with her fate and what may lie beyond death researches Mayan beliefs of death and renewal (these secrets take place in the Orion Nebula). She writes a fantasy book based on these beliefs "The Fountain." She writes chapters 1–11 but leaves the last chapter unfinished for her husband to finish... something that he is very reluctant to do. Her part of the book is about a Spanish conquistador (her husband) searching for eternal life to save his queen (herself) from the Spanish Inquisition by finding the biblical "Tree of Life" hidden in the Mayan world. The space scenes (not necessarily in the future) with him and the Tree of Life in a bubble craft is the way he finishes the book consisting of him reaching the Orion Nebula in order to renew the dying Tree of Life (the metaphor for his beloved wife). He finds that the only way to achieve eternal life is through death, then renewal. In the end I came to the conclusion that the book was the last gift Isabel could give him a way to accept her death (and death in general) which in the end he does.