Spanning over one thousand years, and three parallel stories, The Fountain is a story of love, death, spirituality, and the fragility of our existence in this world.
Three stories - one each from the past, present, and future - about men in pursuit of eternity with their love. A conquistador in Mayan country searches for the tree of life to free his captive queen; a medical researcher, working with various trees, looks for a cure that will save his dying wife; a space traveler, traveling with an aged tree encapsulated within a bubble, moves toward a dying star that's wrapped in a nebula; he seeks eternity with his love. The stories intersect and parallel; the quests fail and succeed.
Written by <jhailey@hotmail.com>
Instead of using CGI, Darren Aronofsky chose to do the special effects for the film by using micro-photography of chemical reactions on tiny petri dishes. He has said that CGI would take away from the timelessness of the film and that he wants the film to stand the test of time.
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Goofs
Errors in geography:
The "Xibalba Nebula" in the movie is the Orion Nebula - which is not gold and does not contain dying stars, unlike in the movie. It is largely pink (from ionized hydrogen gas) and is a stellar nursery where young stars are forming. The first stars to die there will be massive and will not create nebulae first (they will supernova instead).
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The movie ends with a white out, which represents the Big Bang or creation of the Universe. Following that, the white areas behind the credits condense, which correlates with the condensation of matter and ultimate large sale structure of the universe. These devolve to black screen, the early "opaque" stage of the universe, when early particle were forming. From this, stars begin to form, one by one until the credits end with a universe full of stars and the story of our universe to the present, told behind the credits.
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