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100As it happens, each one of these tales is also a love story, and The Fountain is Aronofsky's profession of faith concerning love's place in the idea of eternity. It's a movie that's as deeply felt as it is imagined.
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100It's an ambitious, passionate, grief-stricken work of film art.
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83I'm as touched and charmed by its failures as I am transfixed, at times, by its successful inventiveness and audacity.
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83Viewers not attuned to his (Aronofsky's) heartfelt, bombastic Richard Wagner-by-way-of-"2001: A Space Odyssey" lyricism might be better off looking elsewhere. But they'll never see anything else quite like it.
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80At heart, this is a simple Zen fable about love and death. In execution, it's a complex and gorgeous mini-epic with sterling performances from its two stars.
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75It's often maddening, because of its structure, and some of its visuals are pretentious nonsense. But, as a story of undying love, it's certainly unique.
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75Darren Aronofsky labors awfully hard to get across a pretty simple message in The Fountain. But his efforts are so ethereal and extreme, it's almost impossible to turn away.
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67While the film is intriguing as it's transpiring, it has very little impact. It's more intellectual than emotional, its message doesn't come through without a struggle and it was completely out of my mind five minutes after seeing it.
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63In telling a tale of love across time, Aronofsky is sometimes guilty of creating arty, pretentious psychobabble. But in visual terms, he's trying to expose his own raw, romantic heart. Folly? Maybe. But a risk worth taking.
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63When a film telling three stories and spanning thousands of years has a running time of 96 minutes, scenes must have been cut out. There will someday be a Director's Cut of this movie, and that's the cut I want to see.
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63It's possible to admire or respect a movie without enjoying it too much, and that's partly the reaction I had to Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. It's an incredibly ambitious film of sometimes thrilling visual achievement, but it didn't connect fully to my mind and nerves.
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63There's a geyser of ambition in the visually stunning The Fountain, but the story of a thousand-year quest for the Fountain of Youth eventually trickles out.
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63A noble, shipwrecked folly.
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63The overall experience fails to satisfy on a basic level. This is one of those films it's easier to be impressed with than it is to like.
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63If you want my rock-solid statement on whether The Fountain is a masterpiece or a muddle, check with me in 2026.
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50The Fountain is probably too muddled and half-baked to even attain cult status -- but you can still see what writer-director Darren Aronofsky was striving for, and even if his reach exceeded his grasp, his intentions were both admirable and worthy of respect.
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50An intoxicatingly beautiful but painfully simplistic fable about love and death.
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50A meditation of life, death, reincarnation and biblical symbolism that feels peculiarly like a head-shop poster, blown up to feature-movie size.
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50Like all of his previous films, it's visually arresting - if any recent film embodies the concept of cinema as poetry, this it it - but unlike "Pi" or "Requiem for a Dream," these aren't characters we're ever invested in.
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50The movie would be more bearable without the unyielding score by Clint Mansell, which somehow melds the worst of Minimalism, art rock, and New Age music. It's what you'd hear if your massage therapist wanted to induce a stroke.
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50Part dewey-eyed paperback romance, part acid-trip planetarium show, this extravagantly silly movie comes on like the second coming of "2001."
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50Bloated and logy, and art-directed within an inch of its life, the movie shovels heaps of phony portent and all-purpose mystical imagery onto a thin and maudlin plot.
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50The problem, though, is that its techniques run too far beyond its ideas, which are blurry and banal, rather than mysterious and resonant. The Fountain is something to see, but it is also much less, finally, than meets the eye.
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50With The Fountain, Aronofsky has become the hero of "Pi," without the desistance or the humility. He not only wants to ask the big questions, he tries to tie it all up with The Big Answer. And that's worse than bad metaphysics, it's bad filmmaking.
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50The movie may have significant truths to impart, although I have my doubts, but it feels too inexperienced, too unworldly, to have earned the right to them.
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40Jackman does everything required of him, and his range is quite admirable, while Weisz, who has nothing to prove, does looking gorgeous very nicely.
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40Solemn, flashy, and flabbergasting, The Fountain--adapted by Darren Aronofsky from his own graphic novel--should really be called The Shpritz. The premise is lachrymose, the sets are clammy, and the metaphysics all wet.
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40Suffered from production fits and starts and reportedly has been cut down from a longer running time to a still tedious and repetitious hour and a half.
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40It's a sprawling experiment in philosophical time travel and metaphysical noodling. And it's an earnest, magnificent wreck.
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38Overflows with pretensions and absurdity.
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33Just because The Fountain is different doesn't mean it's good. In fact, it's borderline unwatchable, though this hasn't prevented the Oscar buzz from buzzing.
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30I feel for the marketing person charged with devising a tagline for Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, a fantasy whose turgid pretensions defy the very notion of marketing.
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A pretentious, unfocused, and fussy mess, in which director Darren Aronofsky manages to make Hugh Jackman unattractive and unsympathetic… Even fans of Aronofsky's incoherent, flashy "Pi" and somewhat more coherent, flashy "Requiem for a Dream" will be scratching their heads.
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25Has to be one of the nuttiest, sappiest (literally), most unintentionally hilarious spectacles to come down the time-travel turnpike in eons.
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25The Fountain' never comes together. Like the time traveler at its center, it's all over the map.
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20Aronofsky's reach far exceeds his grasp with this film, and the muddle he concocts makes one wonder if there was ever a solid foundation for The Fountain. Hope may spring eternal, but this fountain is a dry hole.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 126 out of 161
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Mixed: 9 out of 161
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Negative: 26 out of 161
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