Beautiful beyond compare, in every respect.

Rating: 10/10 (15 April 2007)

The Fountain, despite being a richly gorgeous poem-like experience, is NOT a movie for everyone. I guarantee that you will not fully appreciate this film unless you are completely willing to open up your mind all the way, put on your thinking cap, and contemplate the message rather than question the prose. All too often, one expects a movie to do the thinking for them; and The Fountain completely reverses this trend in more than one respect (On that note, please read one of the plot summaries before reading this review - I'm not going to summarize the film for you; I'm only reviewing it :P). The entire movie shares this exact same theme perfectly: the cycle of life and death, and how we as humans both revel in the beauty of the former and languish in the inevitability of the latter. This is more an experience than a movie - more art than entertainment, more poetry than plot. The Fountain, like all three "toms", is transcending common logic in an attempt to save itself from inevitability - while at first the three stories are jumbled and possibly even random to some, in the end it all becomes sequential and perfectly connected. The music, like the film, is festering with suppressed fears. Like every other aspect, it fits both the theme and the mood perfectly. My greatest passions are photography, computer graphics, and science; when I first heard of this movie in 2005, it was on a Digital Art website. The article was explaining the cinematography during the "future" sequence - how it had no CGI whatsoever and was generated by filming chemical reactions on microscopic scales. Having witnessed reactions through a microscope myself and experiencing a "god" moment because of it, I was all a sudden struck both by my memory of the experience and the sheer ingenuity of using one of nature's most beautiful phenomena in lieu of a 50-man crew of Photoshop and MAYA geeks. Oh, and it also helped that I'm a massive fan of Aronofsky's other two films, which I won't delve into now. The main melody, played on guitar but sounding almost like a piano, seems like an anthem to both hope and despair simultaneously. The strings in the background invoke all three settings as well as all the anticipation and nostalgia present in Tom. In short, the score is an absolute masterpiece, and is a perfect companion to the film in every respect.
To put my review in summation, The Fountain is a film where all elements you can possibly imagine - score, cinematography, acting - blend perfectly together. Everything fits everything within this mesmerizing portrait, and because of that, I find The Fountain to be a masterpiece of our generation. I can only hope that it will someday gain the recognition it deserves, overcoming the commercial flop and critical injustice it was given by the general public as so many other masterpieces before it have done.