Loopy science fiction in orbit around the dream of life and love everlasting. It unfolds in three different time zones, that of the Spanish Inquisition, the present day, and some indeterminate future inside a floating bubble in outer space. These three spheres are tied together by the presence in each of them of Rachel Weisz and Hugh Jackman, as, by turns, Queen Isabella and a conquistador called Tomás, commissioned by Her Majesty to find the Tree of Life in the land of the Mayas, and then their apparent reincarnations (or carbon copies or clones or something) in the form of a dying novelist named Izzi, at work on a book titled The Fountain about Queen Isabella's quest for the Tree of Life, and her faithful husband Tommy, a research scientist in quest of a cure, and then, lastly, a ghost of her former selves and an ageless hairless Tom, keeping himself alive artificially (on the bark of a Tree of Life, it would seem) while carrying on into eternity seeking a cure for his wife's death, "a disease like any other." The film has uncommon intensity, even if much of that intensity consists of closeups so close that the faces won't fit on the screen, and much of the rest of it consists of our peering into the semidarkness (a darkness that engulfs science labs, hospital corridors, operating rooms, reading lamps) simply to make out what's in front of our eyes. Writer-director Darren Aronofsky, the Pi man, has worked things out elaborately in terms of visual and verbal motifs (the tree, the ring, the refrain of "Finish it," and so on), but the spectator might be more compelled to sort it out if he were more compelled to look at it. This is a type of science fiction generally restricted to the printed page and banished from the screen, and it does not here establish much of a beachhead. With Ellen Burstyn. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd