Pretentious, not entertaining, no story, wooden characters

Rating: 2/10 (24 June 2007)

This movie contained three parallel stories, or, really, two and a half, squeezed into barely 90 minutes, despite the fact that each one moved very, very slowly. So, none of these three stories were at all well-developed, and all of them were very boring. And none of the characters were well-developed enough for me to care about any of them. So there really wasn't much of any interest here to me.
This movie was kind of full of itself and its symbolism and its unusual and artsy parallel story structure which, I suppose, are supposed to make it seem like it's unique and "deep" to people who are into movies with unusual plot structures and allegedly profound life lessons.
In sum, it felt like pretentious artsy pseudo-philosophical BS that was not remotely entertaining, but was very boring.
And besides that, Hugh Jackman's over-dramatic histrionics are hard to watch, at least to me. Yikes.
I enjoyed Aronofsky's last film Requiem for a Dream, despite the fact that it too was full of life lessons, but after seeing The Fountain, well, I will be thinking more than twice before I see another film by Aronofsky. He seems like a young arrogant director who is full of himself and self-indulgent but who is not really all that interested in entertaining an audience and is more interested in teaching an audience about his vast wisdom.
There's a lot of excessively glowing positive reviews about this stinker here at IMDb, so, just so you don't think I'm bonkers, you can get some more bad reviews, readily accessible to everyone, for free, on the web, in USA Today, Philadelphia Inquirer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times, to name a few.
You'd be better off using the time to see some other movie that is actually entertaining to watch and not so full of pretentious BS.