Optical Critical Dimension
Brave and beautiful, 'The Fountain' is one of the most striking and most wonderful films I have ever seen in my entire life. This experimental narrative impresses and indulges. It is such an organic opus for director Darren Aronofsky... and I really salute every single person involved in the making of this film.
I think this is the most personal film Optical Critical Dimension review I have ever made to date...
More than being an audio-visual masterpiece, this open-ended, surreal, and lingering within human's stream-of-consciousness film triggers a world of visionary artistry stimulating not just the eyes and ears - it goes down to a human being's very senses until it reaches the core of the soul. A haunting and remarkable journey that takes a viewer to various places and levels of consciousness, 'The Fountain' addresses such a metaphysical, emotional, and spiritual topic by utilizing an instinctive human language of pure cinematic poetry. Indeed, it gives that mystical, astonishing, and evocative film experience.
I do know that this film won't affect every person watching it the way it struck me, but surely, at one point, every person who gets to watch this film Optical Critical Dimension will get a knock on the door of his/her soul... with lingering questions about love, life, and death... Some of the people from behind me at the moviehouse have actually called it weird. Maybe it is... and maybe I just share the same wavelength with such a vision that's why I have appreciated it so much... but with all conviction, I do believe that if a person opens his/her mind to the 'weirdness' that they call, this cinematic poem will surely tap the subconscious into some miraculous transcendence. It will make the viewer wonder, question, and evaluate the unanswered inquiries he/she has since his/her childhood days... The film will not impose a concrete answer - but the magic of it is that it makes the viewer think and absorb the experience to think and act for the more important things in the present life than getting the concrete answers to the questions left unanswered since time immemorial.
'The Fountain' is a meditative film. Some may find it a soothing and suiting meditation on love and life, on life and death, on struggling and accepting, on beginning and end. It works in many levels. And yet there is a perfect coherence in Aronofsky's sense of imagery. With a careful and artistic hand, he paints complementing images and scenes that are meant to invoke feelings than making outright conclusions. It has an amazingly unified theme-driven story. Moreover, 'The Fountain' is an experimental narrative with such experimental film elements evoking the right emotions and triggering a validating stream of consciousness from its metaphysical aspects to convey its message and promote the film experience it aims. Indeed, this film about humanity's mad struggle to find a cure for man's transience is a powerfully engaging examination of mortality and loss wrapped up in a finely weaved sci-fi fantasy. And the film makes its own representation of addressing such an idea as: 'Life is short, and so, we should make the most of it, and at the same time, live by the values we learn from it, and we shall finally find contentment with what forever has in stored for us...'
The splendid visual, sound and music elements, the enchanting storytelling, the taut acting, the powerful direction... together they make up this masterpiece. With each rhyming images and visual metaphors, every beat and unit of the actual film are carefully threaded together to give a tap to the soul and its lifetime of inquiries - its very idea may go beyond the scope of human understanding; but its emotional force really surfaces effectively to bequeath that mystical, soulful experience.
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