The Fountain/YMMV

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• Award Snub: Apart from a Golden Globe nomination for Original Score, the film was largely ignored on the awards circuit, even in the areas of visual effects and art direction.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: Clint Mansell's score is nothing short of terrifyingly beautiful and stunningly emotional. Then again, one could expect no less from the award-winning frequent collaborator of director Darren Aronofsky. Just listen to "Death is the Road to Awe" if you still aren't convinced that Clint Mansell can make the world end.
• Epileptic Trees: It's an Epileptic Forest.
• Fridge Brilliance: The members of the Inquisition in the movie come off as evil and nasty due to the atmosphere, but in reality they're only preaching the ultimate truth of the movie: Those who seek immortality and deny death are unnatural and only do more harm than good, like an illness. Like an illness such as Izzy's.
  • The difference being that Buddhism doesn't add "your body is sin, thus you must cleanse it by flaying yourself and your enemies" to the package.
  • The Shout-Out to Bowie's Space Oddity has meaning on more than one level. In the song, Major Tom is able to accept the fact that he is going to die; something Tom eventually does himself.
  • This troper would argue that Tom's quest for immortality wasn't entirely in vain. It allowed him to die in peace after centuries of meditation, instead of bitter and alone.
  • What do we call cells that live forever? Cancer.
• Fridge Horror: The realization that Tom is possibly the last man on Earth (not even that, as the only thing left is the tree and some dirt.)
  • Or that he just turned his back to the world in favour of his pilgrimage. And took the Tree of Life with him.
• Growing the Beard: Hugh Jackman did so literally and figuratively with this film.
• High Octane Nightmare Fuel: When Tomás ingests the sap from the tree and plants start sprouting from his body.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the earliest version of the film, Tommy and Izzy were supposed to be played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Just two years after The Fountain came out, they were cast in a different film in which they play star-crossed lovers who must deal with the complications of unusual movement through time.
• Iron Woobie: Izzy.
• Straw Man Has a Point: Grand Inquisitor Silecio, according to Word of God. "Our bodies are prisons for our souls. Our skin and blood, the iron bars of confinement. But fear not. All flesh decays. Death turns all to ash. And thus, death frees every soul."
• He Really Can Act: Like we said, Jackman. He plays 3 different characters in the film and does so AMAZINGLY well.
  • In fact he spent hours with Aronofsky working on the physicality for each of the three roles. Tomas the id, with a very aggressive walk, coming straight from the pelvis. Tom the superego, incredibly emotional and light. Tommy the ego, very cerebral and driven, focused.
• Narm: There's something fairly absurd about how the flowers explode rapidly on Tomas's body when he drinks from the sticky white sap of the Tree of Life.
• Tear Jerker: And how!
• The Woobie: Tommy
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The effects were produced for a mere pittance, using microphotography (photos of tiny things, like oil droplets) rather than CGI. The result looks profoundly surreal, and stunningly beautiful.