Zack and I watched The Fountain this week.  This sci-fi, time travel, romantic epic starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Wietz was panned by the critics and ignored by audiences.

Oh wise critics and clever audiences!

The movie looked gorgeous.

That's the only good thing I can say about it.

First of all, it wasn't sci-fi; second, it wasn't romantic and third, there was no time traveling.

Rachel W. played a dying woman, Hugh J. was her husband who seemed less in love with her as he was just terrified by the idea of death.  The movie was full of the sort of dreck that atheists come up with to calm their own fear of what lies beyond.

The flashbacks aren't flashbacks, they're the stupid fairy tale that Rachel was writing when she died.  Set in fifteenth century Spain, the Queen sends her Conquistador to the new world to find the tree of life so the two of them can live forever.  He finds it, drinks the sap, which looked like marshmallow creme and almost made me puke; it doesn't work the way he thought it would.  She dies, he plants a tree over her grave and the next thing we know, he's bald, in a big bubble with a tree, soaring through the galaxy towards a nebula where, for some reason known only to PsychoHughbaldy, she's supposed to be reborn.  Instead the tree dies.  Then he floats away.

Sorry that I gave away the "plot"?  Thank your lucky stars that you'll never be tempted to waste one moment of your precious life on this mess of a movie.

As a Christian, I've never empathized with the idea of living forever.  The best thing I've ever read or seen dealing with the subject was a sixth season X-files episode called Tithonus.  In it, Scully meets a man who is 149 yrs old.  He's tired, bored, lonely and feels  bad that he can't remember his wife's name.  He calls folks who die young "lucky bastards".  He tells Scully that 75 years is about right, that more than that is just a chore and pretty soon all you can do is wonder about the "big mystery that everybody else gets to know."  It's a great story.