Supersaturated Hyperrealism

Rating: 9/10 (24 November 2006)

The popular media reviews could not have been more wrong on this movie. This one is a gem. It reminded me first of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, except here, Aronofsky seems to have dedicated himself to some supersaturated form of hyper-realism. The entire conceptual draw of time in this movie forms a sort of multilinear canopy over some strange scaldic fluid. It's amazing how seamlessly this occurs. The past, the future, the present, all possess a strong sense of dislocation from the ordinary; which is to say, "which present could this possibly be?" It feels as though you're floating through the abstract debris of a consciousness unfolding about itself, only to find that its location spans four dimensions.
The heart of the film is a mediation on death, love, time, and the relationship of these phenomena to genesis and life. A wholly apropos treatment, in a day and age when the biological sciences name immortality as the "magic bullet" that they so desperately are seeking. Aronofsky appeals to these sensibilities on enormously subtle and yet deeply profound levels. He seems to want to raise the question, what is life? Does it have meaning without death? And perhaps most importantly, is this endless struggle for immortality really nothing but an almost adolescent misunderstanding of the very nature and meaning of life, to begin with?