The Fountain Sparknotes

[pic] I consider The Fountain an epic because first, it has gods: Mayan and Christian; it’s got a hero, Hugh Jackman, other wise known as; Tommy, and the quested tree of life from the Garden of Eden. It is a life-altering journey also because Tommy finally sees all of the things in life that he has done wrong, like choosing work over his wife, and he also changes the way he treats people. This movie makes the way people think change because they can compare their cultures from today’s culture to that of the medieval days and finally how people could be living in the future. Three parallel stories: about love, death, spirituality, and the fragility of existence, as told through The Odyssey taken on by one man in his thousand-year struggle to save the woman he loves. Tommy’s epic journey begins in 16th-century Spain, where, as conquistador Tomas Creo, he commences his search for the “Tree of Life,” the legendary entity believed to grant eternal life to those who drink of its sap. As modern-day
scientist Tommy Creo, he desperately struggles to find a cure for the cancer that is killing his beloved wife Isabel. Traveling through deep space as a 26th-century astronaut, Tom begins to grasp the mysteries of life that have consumed him for more than a century. This movie was released November 22, 2006. The distributors were the Warner Brothers Pictures Distribution, and for The Fountain the box office raised a whopping $10,139,254! The places where this film was created was: Montreal, Quebec, and Canada. The director was Darren Aronofsky, along with the casts names of: Hugh

Jackman, Rachel Weisz, Donna Murphy, Mark Margolis, Ellen Burstyn, and Sean Patrick Thomas. The movie created an interesting concept, allowing a person to think about what is really important in life, and attempting to change the idea of the fear of death and the unknown by highlighting the divine presence in every day life. It should not be taken for granted and the idea that death is not a waste or an end of some kind, but a divine happening as well, a sacrifice to allow the continuation of every other living being. In one scene in the movie, Tommy’s wife Izzy has just had a seizure and is in the hospital, when a test monkey for brain tumors has made a miraculous recovery and the tumor is shrinking!
But then the movie cuts to a scene of Izzy being in the hospital and she dies before Tommy can save her. At the funeral Tommy states: “death is a disease like any other, and there is a cure and I will find it,” showing his fear/ disgust of death. Three stories; one each from the past, present, and future; about men in pursuit of eternity with their love. A conquistador in Mayan country searches for the tree of life to free his captive queen; a medical researcher, working with various trees, looks for a cure that will save his dying wife; a space traveler, traveling with an aged tree encapsulated within a bubble, moves toward a dying star that's wrapped in a nebula; he seeks eternity with his love. The stories intersect and parallel; the quests fail and
succeed. When Tommy (the 500 year old Tommy) is about to go towards the supernova in the end of the film, he says hes not afraid. The whole point of the movie was that “death” is not a disease like Tommy said, but instead a path to “awe” which keeps being repeated in the movie over again. When Tommy goes to “die” in the supernova, he realizes he is not afraid of death, just as Izzy was not afraid of death right before she died because he finally understood her epiphany; death was only the key to another form of life, or “awe” as they continually call it in the movie. The whole point of this movie is to get away from the idea of the death of the human body, basically death as we know it, as being evil or bad or a disease. Instead it is a gateway to another form of life. Thomas was simply converted to another form of life, one with the tree, one with everything. Basically, in the end of the movie, Tommy finally becomes enlightened, and realizes that his fate is not to bring Izzy back from the dead, into human life as he may have originally planned, but instead realizes that both he and Izzy are to become one with everything in the universe and to realize death as a means to “awe”. This is why he sacrifices himself up to the supernova, simultaneously in Tomas’s time being the first father as he becomes one with the tree. It wasn’t that Tommy couldn’t “save” Izzy. It’s that he finally realized that Izzy didn’t need saving, and neither did he. They would be together forever, just like he wanted, but in a different way than he thought.