The Fountain Book

Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain is an art gallery in book form. Anyone who's seen the spectacular masterpiece that is Aronofsky's film, released in 2006, will not be surprised. The Fountain, starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz is one of the most beautiful films in recent history, where Clint Mansell's incredible score perfectly complements the stunning visuals on display.

The film itself was a polarizing experience for moviegoers, but few could deny the film was visually stunning. For that reason alone, I feel I could recommend this book to not only fans of the film, but ones that weren't taken in by the story also.

This book contains some of my favourite images but it is not without its faults.

The formatting of the book has many images stretched across the two pages but the way the book is bound results in the images being compressed and parts of the picture obscured.   The book is fairly small dimension-wise too, which means the images don't have as great an impact as they might otherwise have.

A larger book akin to the ones produced by Abrams for The Art of Star Wars series might have worked better for The Fountain.

Another note, although this is not necessarily a negative, is that there is no text in the book to accompany the images (with the exception of a handful of quotes embedded in the images), not even a foreword. However, a copy of the script is attached to the last page.

But, given that the film itself is one that has been open to interpretation, perhaps it's fitting that the images carry no description and can stand on their own.

Even so, these small issues don't take away from the book. A film like The Fountain deserves an accompanying book highlighting it's photography. And whilst I may have hoped for a better production for the book, it is nonetheless a worthy addition to any film aficionados collection.