The Fountain Explained: What Was It All About?
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The Fountain Explained: What Was It All About?

The brilliant Darren Aronofsky‘s The Fountain is a masterpiece mucosa in magical realism that has romance seeping from its every crevice. The movie is metaphorical and well-nigh love spanning centuries with its roots in metaphysics and spiritualism. If you watch the multi-layered mucosa in the right state of mind, it might plane help you overcome your fear of mortality. It’s one of those films where you require multiple viewings to make your own sense of the unconvincing concepts. This vendible will go through the story and swoop into the film’s essential themes. Here’s the plot and ending of the movie The Fountain explained; spoilers ahead.

Contents

Here are links to the key aspects of the movie:

The Fountain: Plot Explained

The mucosa is mainly well-nigh the romance between the leads. It stars Hugh Jackman, who plays the roles of Tomas, the Spanish conquistador, Tom Creo, the surgeon and the space traveler. Rachel Weisz captures the other main lead by playing the notation of Queen Isabella of Spain and Izzy Creo, the present-day author. It is divided into three iterations that often seem like three variegated periods, but they are all loosely unfluctuating and are represented by visual motifs. The mind-bending cinematography and soul-wrenching soundtrack are applaudable, as is the performance by the two actors.

Present Day: Doctor

The Fountain Present day doctor

Tom Creo is the scientist with the weight of the world on his shoulders as he attempts to find a cure for degenerative smart-ass diseases by experimenting on monkeys with tumors. Tom’s drastic attempts to find a miracle cure are fueled by his wife’s worsening health due to a smart-ass tumor. 

Unlike her husband, Izzy has found visa of her impending death as she wrote a book she named The Fountain, the story of Queen Isabella and her conquistador. She asks Tom to finish the last installment of her book. In denial, Tom continues to experiment, using the yelp of a tree found in Guatemala. The experiments show remarkable synaptic growth and age-reversing effects, but the tumor doesn’t shrink. Desperation creeps in as Izzy’s health worsens, and Tom continues to fight with everyone in his lab, plane experiencing a dispersal when he loses his wedding ring.

On her deathbed, Izzy tells him the story of her Mayan guide, who, in withholding of his father’s death, planted a seed on his grave, which grew into a trappy tree. The moment Tom’s superior informs him that the tumor in the monkey is shrinking as a result of the experiment is the moment that Izzy draws her final breath. Grief-stricken, Tom experiences a psychotic unravel where he etches a wedding wreath made of ink by piercing his skin using the fountain pen given to him by Izzy. He returns to work and vows to find the secret to immortality as he believes “death is a disease”.

Conquistador & Queen Isabella

The Fountain Spanish Tree of Life

The historically inaccurate tale is well-nigh Tomas, loyally unseat to Spain, and Queen Isabella, who is losing her kingdom to the Inquisitor. As a last struggle at survival, she grants Tomas a quest to retrieve life-giving sap from the Tree of Life, based in the Mayan region of New Spain, using a formalism dagger. She bestows upon him a ring with the promise to wilt “his Eve” and that they will live together forever. 

During the quest, Tomas faces hardship and loses most of his hairdo due to a failed coup. Upon reaching the footsteps of the subconscious Mayan temple, he gets attacked by Mayan warriors who gravity him to climb the pyramid alone. Once he gets to the top and enters the temple, he is met by the leader priest, who stabs him. Tomas is replaced by a vision of the space traveler whom the Mayan priest acknowledges to be the First Father and offers his life as a sacrifice. 

Tomas kills him and proceeds to find the ever-blooming and sky-reaching Tree of Life. Without the sap heals his wound, he gulps it lanugo but soon, he keels over with pain. Horrified, Tomas watches as flowers and grass grow in the injury. He desperately tries to rip them out but fails; he dies, and his soul gives way to new life.

Space Traveler

the fountain space traveller

In a glass dome biosphere, Tommy, a space traveler tends to a tree, its yelp responding to his touch. Little by little, he eats the tree’s yelp to survive and performs tai chi. He has tattoos of rings on his stovepipe and a woebegone wreath made of ink on his ring finger. He is commonly visited by an self-deception of Izzy but appears unsated by it. 

The camera weaves in and out, intertwined with scenes from the present day and the 16th century. As the biosphere floats up towards the inside part of Xibalba’s nebula, an self-deception of Izzy in her hospital bed appears while simultaneously, the tree is dying. He comforts the tree and tells it that soon, Xibalba will die, and when it explodes, it will result in the rebirth of the tree, and he will moreover live.

As Izzy dies in the present day, so does the tree in the biosphere. The man, wrestling and devastated, cries out in pain. Later, he traces his tattoos and ring mark as he reminisces how the tree was his unvarying through the years and pulled him through time.

As his biosphere rises and reaches near Xibalba, Izzy appears to him once more. Tormented, he screams asking to be left vacated and admits that he’s afraid. Queen Isabella replaces Izzy and asks him to unhook Spain from bondage. Tommy expresses he does not know how to, but the Queen/Izzy self-deception assures him that he does and he will. In fervent ticket to Izzy’s and Queen Isabella’s apparitions, Tommy accepts that he will die. As the apparitions intone that they will be together forever, he repeats it, and peace dawns on his face. He climbs the tree, exits the biosphere in a smaller glass bubble, and nears the dying star. He puts on the wedding ring, and Xibalba goes supernova and creates new life.

The Fountain: Themes: What was it about?

The Fountain’s symbolism is thought-provoking and touches upon mortality stuff the truth of life.

Biblical Symbolism

The mucosa takes messages from Bible regarding the Tree of Life, the Fountain of Youth, Eden, the path to salvation, and transitioning to light from the dark. The movie emphasizes moving from darkness to light in the same way Christianity talks well-nigh how stuff separated from light is to be separated from God.

Mayan Culture

The movie is rife with references to the Mayan religion, expressly in the form of the Tree of Life and Xibalba. Izzy explains that in Mayan mythology, the tree’s root sprouted from the soul of the First Father as he sacrificed himself to create new life and earth. His soul were the branches that worked the sky. Xibalba, the nebula, was the First Father’s throne that was hung in the heavens by his children and became the Mayan underworld, Xibalba. Izzy hinted at an immortal life without death where the couple will be together once Xibalba explodes and gives lineage to new life. However, the mucosa appears to create its own origin story virtually Xibalba.

Hinduism and Buddhist references

Aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism moreover find their way into The Fountain, as the mucosa highlights the journey toward light. We see the space traveler seem the lotus position and threnody incantations as he meditates; his survival hinges on consuming only the yelp of the tree.

Mortality

Man’s obsession with finding immortality and conquering death is the movie’s inside idea. Except for Izzy, all other notation frantically search for a way to write-up death. As Aronofsky remarked, mortality is the thing that makes humans (and life in general) special.

The Fountain Ending Explained: Overcoming Fear of Death

The Fountain ending explained

The ending of The Fountain drives home the point that the secret to living a fulfilling life is to winnow mortality. Plane though Tomas dies, he is immortalized as his soul becomes a part of the Tree of Life. The space traveler’s peace with the idea of death occurs when he discerns that it is what will indulge him to be together with the love of his life forever. Tommy’s realization and visa of death come at the end when he places a seed on top of Izzy’s grave and says goodbye.

The movie Fountain is heavily influenced by new-age beliefs and ties them in with other religious beliefs. It consists of sudden switches between scenes and moments of blinding lights, which are essential to the plot transitions. The Fountain is one of the movies that attempted to integrate many out-of-the-world ideas into 96 minutes and somewhat succeeded.

Many viewers perceive time travel in it, but that has not been explicitly made clear. It is increasingly likely that the story of Tomas and Queen Isabella were the chapters that Izzy wrote in her book. The story of the space traveler is the last installment of The Fountain that Tommy wrote as he finished the typesetting as part of his late wife’s final wish. However, as Aronofsky hinted, the mucosa can be interpreted in many ways, so it is up to the audience.

What did you think well-nigh the overall storytelling and ending of The Fountain? Do leave your comments below.

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