The Fountain: Or Don't Eat the Brown Acid, Man!

Cafe Society
41

I just watched this move lastnight too. Man…I’m not sure if I liked it or hated it. I did get a bit teary eyed in parts during the current Izzy and Tom, but most of the movie I was just lost.

42

**My synopsis is shorter: **

2001 as a love story.

43

There are three threads:

  1. Izzy’s story. Fictional. Had two main characters, imagined in Tom’s mind as himself and Izzy, but weren’t really them.
  2. Reality. Izzy is dying, Tom finds a cure just days too late to save her.
  3. Tom’s wish for the future. Perhaps if he lives forever he may find a way to restore her to life. His method is to fly a surreal spaceship containing her tree to a nebula. He fails, because you cannot bring back the dead. But it was only a wish, and didn’t actually happen.

It seemed pretty clear to me what was going on, after I finished watching it (surprisingly - I often miss things amongst surreality like that).

44

[nitpick]I don’t believe that the treatment made the monkey any more intelligent, but returned him to functionality that they had not seen until prior to his tumor forming.[/nitpick]

45

This was my reaction.

I enjoyed the first half hour or so. Then I started to grok where the thing was going, and what it was all supposed to mean. And I got worried: “It’s got to be about more than that. All this noise and kerfuffle, for that message? Can’t be.”

And at the end: “Nope, that’s all it was.” Press Eject.

Great visuals, and Tuckerfan’s complaints notwithstanding a fantastic performance by Hugh Jackman. (Seriously. The director says, “Okay, you’re going to cut a hole in a tree and suck out the jizz, and you have to mean it.” It takes a hell of an actor to pull that off. I mean, try to imagine Ashton Kutcher diving into a tree’s muff. Don’t undersell what Jackman achieved here.) Ultimately, though, it’s a lot of handwaving for not very much.

46

Do you mean the “2001” that is about how an alien intelligence provokes the evolution of the human species? What part of “The Fountain” bears any relation to that?

47

The part where Rachel Weisz beats Hugh Jackman to death with a femur?