Vigorously booed at the Venice Film Festival, acclaimed as masterpiece by others, this time-travel extravaganza hits our shores after six years of labor from director Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream). Wildly ambitious in its scope, The Fountain takes place over a thousand years and weaves together three stories, with the same actors helming each thread. Rachel Weisz (the good wife of Mr. Aronofsky), fresh from her Oscar triumph in The Constant Gardner, brings her sexy intelligence to the role of a woman trying desperately to finish writing a book while fighting a life-threatening disease. Studly Hugh Jackman is the man who flies through time and space to tap into the “tree of life” in an attempt to save his beloved. Along the way, he becomes a sixteenth-century conquistador, a modern-day scientist, and a bald guy floating in a bubble ship through space in the 2500s. Looking both daring and outlandish (not to mention all its New Age claptrap), The Fountain could be Aronofsky’s Matrix … or his Battleship Earth.
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