by Rianne Hill Soriano

Created on: December 17, 2010   Last Updated: December 21, 2010

Brave and beautiful, "The Fountain" is one of the most striking and wonderful films I have ever seen. This experimental narrative impresses and indulges. It is such an organic opus from director Darren Aronofsky.

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 the 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. It offers that mystical, mythical, 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 will get a knock on the door of his/her soul… with lingering questions about love, life, and death.

Some people may call it weird. Perhaps, it is. But with all conviction, I do believe that if a person opens his or her mind to the "weirdness" that they call, this cinematic poem will surely tap the subconscious into some miraculous transcendence. It can make the viewer wonder, question, and evaluate his or her unanswered inquiries. This film does 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 life's present course than getting the concrete answers to the questions left unanswered since time immemorial.

"The Fountain" is a meditative film. Some may find it as 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. Yet, there is a perfect coherence in Aronofsky’s sense of imagery. With a careful and artistic hand, he paints complementing images and scenes meant to invoke feelings than making outright conclusions.

The film features an amazingly unified theme-driven story. It showcases such experimental film elements evoking the right emotions and triggering a validating stream of consciousness from its metaphysical aspects to convey its message and celebrate the cinematic experience it offers. Indeed, this film about humanity's mad struggle to find a cure to man’s

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