The Fountain Review

Losing Brad Pitt and roughly half of a seventy million dollar budget before a frame was shot turned out to be the making of this film's look. Rather than build a nebula inside a computer, the production photographed chemical reactions in petri dishes through macro lenses, work supervised by Peter Parks, and the consequence is that a picture from 2006 has not aged an hour while every digital starfield of its generation has curdled.

Matthew Libatique gives the three strands three distinct golds, and Clint Mansell's score with the Kronos Quartet and Mogwai is the spine the editing hangs from. The writing is the problem. The conquistador material plays as costume pageant, the lines reach for scripture and settle for aphorism, and the insistence that death is a disease is asserted far more often than it is dramatized.

Rachel Weisz is warm and precise and has almost nothing to do except be dying. Jackman commits without reserve, and the hospital scenes are rawer than anything else in his work, but the shaved-head space passages ask him to perform a state rather than a person and he cannot find the door in. The bubble carrying the tree is the most beautiful image Aronofsky has made and the least legible, and anyone who bounces off it is not being obtuse.