Review: The Fountain

I saw this a while ago but never got around to setting aside enough time for writing about it. Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain is stunning. If you like philosophical stories, science fiction stories, or stories that contain unconventional ideas then you must see this film. Unfortunately you'll have to wait until it's on DVD at this point; it's already out of theaters and it came out less than a month ago. I'm surprised it got such a wide release on November 22, to be honest I can't believe this movie even came to fruition. If you can't wait to rent it and don't mind knowing the plot in advance, there is a great graphic novel version of the story that Aronofsky published when he didn't think he was ever going to get the film made. The story behind the making of The Fountain alone is inspiring to anyone who's had a hard time trying to organize a dream project with little support from others.
The Fountain cannot be described, it has to be seen. It's about death, life, love and the fear of losing it forever. It's difficult to watch at some points, but for the most part you won't be able to look away. The trailer doesn't really tell you what the film is about (a major reason why most people didn't get interested by it); I don't think I can really tell you what it's about. I can tell you that it's powerful and it will affect you if you allow it. This is easily one of my top 5 movies of the year and one of my new favorites in the category of Sci-Fi.
I was pretty psyched for this movie when I first read about it a couple years ago, then came that first trailer and I was hooked. A story that spans 1000 years? It has conquistadors AND space travel? And on top of that the visual effects were jaw-dropping. I was hoping so badly for an epic Sci-Fi movie; the 2001: A Space Odyssey of my generation. As a fan of Science Fiction films, it saddens me when I try think of the best films of the genre; there's really only a handful of standards by which all others are compared. But this year there has been a pretty good crop of genuinely good Sci-Fi fare. A Scanner Darkly was the best adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel to date, The Science of Sleep possessed some of the same ideas that were floated in Michel Gondry's previous film the masterful Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Fountain turned out to be more of a mind-trip than anyone had anticipated, and the soon to be released Children of Men looks to be a well presented, terrifying vision of our near future a la George Orwell's 1984.
So I still have hope for the genre and can't wait to see what future filmmakers will come up with, and I hope that there will always be someone out there with have the foresight to finance them. Here are some stories about the current state of Science Fiction in Cinema: An MSNBC story on futuristic films, and an article from Wired about Sci-Fi in Hollywood.