Movie Review - The Fountain

The Fountain (3 of 5): The Fountain is a bit of a mixed bag. At its heart, it is a love story, but it also has some science fiction and fantasy elements, which makes classifying the movie as any one particular genre difficult. Unfortunately, I think this aspect hinders the movie from being really good.

The film is presented in three different time periods. Tomas (Hugh Jackman) is a 16th century Conquistador on a hunt to retrieve sap from the mythical Tree of Life for his queen (Rachel Weisz), who is desperate for immortality. In 2005, Tom (Jackman) is a doctor searching for the cure to cancer to save the life of his wife Izzi (Weisz), who is in the final days of her battle with death. Then, many years later, Tom travels through space on a quest to reach the place of tranquility that Izzi spoke fondly of, using the Tree as a device to get him to the answers he needs to finally rest.

The various elements of the story, including time, immortality, love and spirituality form a story that is challenging and demanding to the viewer of the film. Although these elements are a great strength to the movie by making it such a unique film, they also drag the movie down too. In the end I felt that there was very little actual story presented and a whole lot of mildly confusing filler and visual imagery. The story itself needed to be grander to fit the epic scale of time that the film spans. Also, it may frustrate some viewers that the ending is not very clear. There are a lot of different ways that you can fit the various pieces of the movie together based on the ending of this film.

Overall, I liked the Fountain. There are some great performances from both Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. If the story was just a little more clear and well developed and there was more reason to care about the characters plights, I would have liked it a lot more.