Because I finish around 10am on Tuesdays and Thursdays this semester, I decided to catch up on some movies I'd been curious about. I ended up watching three: "I, Robot," "The Fountain," and "X-Men: The Last Stand."
Of the three, "The Fountain" was easily the best, though it's not a film for everyone. "Robot" and "X-Men" were forgettable action fare; "The Fountain," on the other hand, was unabashedly religious in tone and content. The movie's pacing is slow, deliberate, and a bit surreal; the viewer isn't quite sure, by the end of the film, how much of the story was simply a product of the protagonist Tom Creo's* mind. "The Fountain" is, at its heart, a movie about one man's attempt to save his terminally ill wife. I found the film touching, and think it deserves a second viewing.
*Get it? Tom = doubter, like a doubting Thomas; Creo = "I believe."
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2 comments:
Interesting!
As an SF-person, the word among other SF people is that, whatever else it is, "The Fountain" is a horrible SF movie. Of course, that doesn't surprise me. PoMo types told em time and time again that Pi was a great SF film, from which I took that those PoMo types didn't know anything about SF.
But I also get the impression Aronofsky was trying for profound, which, even if he failed, is more than Xmen and I Robot were designed to achieve.
If only someone who knew something about SF would try to make a profound SF film. *Sigh* It would be quite doable, for example with Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang.
Gord,
I'd have to agree that "The Fountain" in no way passes muster as sci-fi. I see it as a religious film with sci-fi elements that deals with one man's attempt to save his wife's life and, perhaps more fundamentally, reconcile himself with the reality of death.
I'm hoping to write a blog post about this, because the movie's themes remind me of themes in a book I'm reading: The Denial of Death by psychologist Ernest Becker, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book. His son, Max Becker-Pos, has a blog which is on my sidebar. Max used to teach at Smoo; he now lives in Japan with his wife and twin sons.
Kevin
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