So, we’ve got a gorgeously cinematic SF movie with a fractured chronology, an elegiac tone, lost love and death, and a heap of mysticism centered around a dying star. If that sounds familiar, it’s possibly because you saw the Steven Soderbergh Solaris, and your reaction to that should be a pretty good predictor of your reaction to this. It turns out that I love that sort of thing[1], so there you are.

Also, it’s funny because everything I criticized Pan’s Labyrinth for is true for this movie: It didn’t have a strong story, its characters were mostly sketched outlines, and it’s highly ambiguous about what’s real and what’s metaphor. Despite which I still like it. It’s because it’s… I don’t know how to say it exactly, less NPRish, I guess. Pan’s Labyrinth is all right on the surface, elbowing you in the ribs to drive home the parallels between fascism in Spain and this lost fairy kingdom; it’s the sort of movie that wants to make you feel all smart and cultured. Contrariwise, there’s very little surface about The Fountain, and it seems like it wants to make you feel stupid. Bad explanation, probably, but hey.

  1. What’s funny is, I strongly remember loving Solaris, and clearly over time, it has stuck in my memory as an excellent film — but I just went and looked at what I wrote when I first saw it, and it turns out that I was all meh. Let this be a lesson not to trust one’s immediate impression of things, I guess. ↩︎