This makes me wonder if anyone can make good surrealist fiction . . .

Rating: 4/10 (30 November 2008)

Before you assume I'm one of the countless people who didn't get the plot, thus doesn't like this movie, think again. I understood everything about The Fountain from open to close. Being someone who honestly used to enjoy good surrealist fiction, I hoped this may have been at least worth a watch. And maybe it was. However, the main problem isn't that the movie was too confusing, but rather that it was too elementary.
It's almost an unspoken rule among bad surrealist authors and screenwriters: "If I'm too unintelligent to think of anything but a traditional, clichéd plot, then I have to awe the viewer into thinking I've done something so utterly original and intelligent they don't even realize I just picked up some children's book off my bookshelf and copied it word-for-word." Darren Aronofsky knows that rule, and he follows it here. It fooled a lot of viewers, but it didn't fool me.
The surrealist elements of The Fountain deal with the (presumed) spiritual world of the Garden of Eden. The main character, who is presented as your standard male hero, tries to save his dying wife by finding the Fountain of Youth, aka the Tree of Life in this spiritual world by finding a way to reverse aging in the physical world through medicine. That's the basic synopsis you get from the first fifteen minutes, and that plot takes you up to the last twenty minutes when the results of all this come into place. Without spoiling anything, the ending is traditional and expected, butback to that ruleis laced with some of the most over-the-top surrealist imagery ever put on screen. If you see past the intense flashes of gold light, you'll realize the ending was completely dull and unoriginal. And so was the rest of the movie.
So . . .
This is the point when it gets hard for me to write a review. Put simply, The Fountain isn't likely going to be in the top 10 worst movie list you've ever seen, but that doesn't mean it isn't bad. Like the rule states, it bashes you over the head with some very pretty environments and some truly emotional-grabbing scenes in order to create a faux sense of awe . . . then nothing. It's like going to a concert and the stage lights are going crazy and the band is tearing up the stage with more energy than anything you've ever seen and the lead singer tells you the meaning to one of their most powerful songs and it hits you hard . . . but they don't sing.
Put another way: The Fountain is literally nothing but a small love story with a semi-cliché ending. All the surrealist aspects are throw-away when it comes to the actual plot. They're just a hook. If that's what you enjoy, traditional love stories, then this movie is for you. But if you came here for a deep, intelligent movie, then you're going to be disappointed like I was. I guess I'm trying to instruct you to watch it with low expectations.
Other minor complaints/complements: The surrealist aspects really got so over-the-top they were borderline cheesy in more than one part of the movie. They also needed to be shortened by a lot, because they took away from the shallow plotwhich was the director's intention. On the other hand, the casting was very well selected and the acting was solid.The director avoided a lot of obvious things he could have done to cheese this movie up considerablysuch as add pointless nudity or a longer run-timeand that is something else I give him credit for.
Overall, worth a watch. Once. You may like it or you may not. It is not the intelligent, original movie that the trailer advertises it is. If anything, it's pretty typical.
4/10