UK Release Date: 28-05-2007
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz
Price: £19.99
UK Certificate: 15
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Country: US
Distributor: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

So, what went wrong? How did Darren Aronofsky, director of Pi and Requiem for a Dream, manage to waste five years and tens of millions of dollars on this hubristic, juvenile, vapid mess? A visually sumptuous but emotionally unengaging movie, The Fountain’s success or failure was always going to rest on the strength of its ideas. All Aronofsky seems to have to say, however, is that the injustice and terror of imminent death can be bypassed by subscribing to a hazy spiritualism: always head towards the light, ideally while sitting cross-legged and thinking fluffy Mayan-Buddhist-New Age mystical thoughts. Because this central underpinning is so weak, the love-spanning-a-millennium conceit – Hugh Jackman as a conquistador on a fantastical quest in the Mayan jungle, a neuroscientist experimenting on chimps to find a cure for his wife, and a meditating traveller riding around space in a bubble he shares with a tree – feels like a way to shoehorn a bunch of random ideas into one feature.

This is a brave and ambitious movie, and an original one. Unfortunately, it’s also an object lesson in how piling too much talent on flimsy conceptual foundations can make a film collapse in on itself, and it’s all too easy to imagine the studios being distinctly wary of Aronofsky and his ego in the future.