Just came back home from a quick visit to the movies; my sister and I thought we’d check “The Fountain” out, and I am glad we did. Because it was a rather nice movie. Kinda peculiar, and almost impossible to do justice to in a short synopsis, since revealing even the smallest detail could diminish the viewing pleasure of someone who hasn’t watched it yet. So I’ll try to keep this as general as possible.

Resembling a kind of a mix between “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Donnie Darko” (in lack of better referances), “The Fountain” tells a very personal story about grief and how to cope with death. These themes are dealt with through three parallell and occasionally converging plot lines. One is fictional (within the fictional universe of the movie) yet realistic, taking place in Spain and Central America around 1500; the second more realistic still — the only “real” level in the film; and the third metaphysical, and possibly imaginary, as it takes place inside a bubble that travels towards the centre of a dying star.

The way in which these three lines are tied together and formed into a whole is perhaps the best part of the film. In the beginning, the viewer knows close to nothing, and has to piece tiny pieces of information together as they are revealed — something which is far from difficult; it doesn’t take long before it becomes apparent what is going on. This goes on for about an hour, before the three parts pretty much melt together in the end, and we get rather trippy scenes (thus the “2001″ comparison) with a lot of symbolism, which aren’t all that easy to make sense of, until the end, when everything becomes obvious: Someone has learned to accept death and to view it as a natural part of life. Death thus becomes the only true immortality, oxymoronic as it may sound.

These tales are told in beautiful imagery, and while the metaphysical level in stands out in this respect, neither the past nor the present looks noticably bad. The score supports the effects and the scenery most effectively.

“The Fountain”’s weakest point, however, is that its attempts to be emotional sometimes tip over into the embarrassing and the melodramatic. But this all helps to support the plot, so I won’t hold it against it, at least not very much. I might also add that this is the first movie I’ve ever watched during which people have left the theatre in the middle of the film and not come back. I suspect that this might indicate that some people could find it boring and meaningless, but what do I know. Perhaps the people who left just remembered that they’d forgot to turn off the stove or something.

All in all, this is a beautiful movie about life and death. It can be a tad pretentious at times, but if everyone was to shied away from pretentiousness, then there would be no progress. 8.0/10.