10 Sci-Fi Movies That Get Better The Deeper You Go

5. The Fountain

Some sci-fi movies encourage weird for the sake of weirdness and seek meaning or validation in the very idea that there isn't meaning. It's basically an answer to the assumed dependability of the existence of a "higher power." At first look, The Fountain appears to be like that - another provocatively odd bit of art designed to provoke and jolt, but not necessarily to answer anything.

It's an incredibly bold movie, in aesthetic terms and its story of three parallel stories seemingly happening in different time periods makes for enriching experience and lots of new discoveries with multiple watches. It's also something of a gateway movie, in that its philosophical ideas are linked to real world ones like Mayan ideas of creation, which actually encourages the viewer to go and read about it and "go deeper" that way.

But even without that, challenging the film's apparently "linear" idea of the three time periods and its ideas about reality and the relationship between creation and death adds a whole new level of meaning. It becomes more about the human mortal fear and how it challenges our existence.