10 Sci-Fi Movies That Were Way Too Complicated
3. The Fountain
Six years after making Acid Trip: The Movie (aka Requiem For a Dream), Darren Aronofsky somehow went a step further.
Starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz, The Fountain focuses on three sets of lovers bonded together across time. Well that's half the number of storylines as Cloud Atlas.
So far, so good.
What it lacks in differentiating plotlines, this film more than makes up for in utterly insane visuals. One of the different narratives is Jackman travelling through space to find a magical tree (or something) and that gets pretty wild pretty quickly.
The idea of The Fountain is that several of the stories actually exist within the worlds of the others. If this meta narrative clicks with you, then it really elevates the plot. If it doesn't, you will have absolutely no idea what's going on.
Aronofsky only seems to make two kinds of movies; high concept art pieces or small, character-driven stories about people on the fringe of society. And then whatever the hell Noah was.
This movie definitely falls into the former category, which will leave many people crying out for a wrestler or ballet dancer to come along and explain what's happening.