The Fountain (2006) Critic Reviews

The 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.Read the full review

It's a sprawling experiment in philosophical time travel and metaphysical noodling. And it's an earnest, magnificent wreck.Read the full review

Bloated 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.Read the full review

Overflows with pretensions and absurdity.Read the full review

With 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.Read the full review

The 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.Read the full review

I 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.Read the full review

Viewers 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.Read the full review

Suffered 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.Read the full review