Good morning 🐣

Stop reading this. Just scroll back up and gaze at that image a little longer.

What a way to start the morning, huh?

You might recognize it already — the Pillars of Creation — massive clouds of gas and dust almost 7,000 light-years away in the Eagle Nebula, each pillar being several light-years long. These are behemoths.

And as you probably already know, NASA recently launched a brand spankin’ new telescope deep into space and the images coming back have been jaw dropping. Take the one above for example. It’s a near-infrared image with more detail of this region than ever before. Look at all those stars in the background! And below is another image sent back using mid-infrared. It’s like some long lost heavy metal album cover with cosmic mustangs galloping through the heavens, traces of the divine trailing behind them.

Nearby stars are slowly eroding these clouds of gas and dust, while new stars form within. Creation through destruction — an ancient religious concept written in the sky.

“The Fountain” is pregnant with that theme and repeats the above quote again and again. But it’s a love-it-or-hate-it type deal, with Rotten Tomatoes critics split down the middle. When it was released back in 2006, Dana Stevens at Slate called it “a grand folly of a movie” and Roger Ebert wondered, “Is the film a success? Not for most people, no.”

So why the Hell am I recommending it!?

Because it’s a grand folly of a movie that, when it first came out, blew the mind of an 18-year-old Freshman-in-Mythology-class Joe who had to see it in theaters multiple times. Rewatching it now, for the first time in likely fifteen years, it still holds up as an ambitious, pretentious, thoughtful, and absolutely gorgeous fever dream of a motion picture.

It follows three basic storylines:

1. The main timeline: A scientist (Hugh Jackman, “Kate & Leopold”) trying to cure cancer and save his dying wife (Rachel Weisz, “The Mummy”),

2. A conquistador (also Hugh Jackman) storming a Mayan temple in search of the Tree of Life, and

3. A bald, cosmic voyager (you guessed it, Hugh Jackman) traveling through space in a bubble to a dying nebula with only a tree and his memories as companions.

It’s NASA’s latest imagery from the James Webb telescope that first made me want to rewatch this. It got me wondering about how we represent space on film, especially before computer animation became so prevalent. There are some stunning handmade (you know I love that handmade stuff) portrayals of space in older movies and I could probably write a feature-length article on that. But then I remembered that the filmmakers of “The Fountain,” in order to save money, decided to ditch the computers and try making their grand cosmic imagery the old fashioned way.

They experimented with chemicals and bacteria in Petri dishes (even tossing in things like yeast and curry powder) and filmed these rollicking fluids at the microscopic level, inserting them into the backgrounds behind the actors to portray the dying nebula. Check out this video from a year ago — I have no idea if it’s legit but it claims to be connected to the film and Peter Parks, the guy who ran these experiments. It’s got some really cool chemical reactions that look straight out of “The Fountain.”

In an interview with the filmmakers at Animation World Network, visual effects supervisor/designer Jeremy Dawson explains, “We liked using something so small to illustrate something so massive and the whole cyclical nature of the film being about life and death.”

In the same interview, the writer/director himself, Darren Aronofsky (“Black Swan”), thinks:

It’s going to be looking really good for a very long time because it’s real particles in real physical space. It’s not like the technology that was responsible for it is going to change and we’re going to start to see through it, which I find in a lot of CGI work sometimes six months or a year down the line. As an audience member, you start to see the magic trick.

He’s totally right. The techniques they used are timeless and somehow make the cosmic relatable and alien at the same time. As you can probably tell by now, I’m fascinated by tactical, practical effects work — puppetry and stop-motion (or go-motion if you remember my tribute to Phil Tippett back in June), the monstrous creations of Rob Bottin in “The Thing,” the optical illusions of Georges Méliès at the dawn of filmmaking — and “The Fountain” continues that tradition of using one thing to create another, to trick the eyes into seeing what isn’t really there, to find a deep human truth at the bottom of a Petri dish.

But all nerdiness aside, let’s be real; it’s pretty awesome seeing flowers violently erupt from a conquistador’s eyes and mouth, one of many visual highlights in a movie full to the brim with them.

Until next time! 👋