Manda sent me the art book version of this story for my birthday. A film version was first started in 2002, but was shut down when Brad Pitt left. Aronofsky went to work both on a revised screenplay and a graphic novel based on the original screenplay. The realized movie version (with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz instead of Brad and Cate Blanchett) was released in 2006.

There aren’t many differences from the first version to the second the trio of parallel stories fulfill the same general contexts (with a few minor plot changes), but the improvement seems to be how they are spliced together in the completed movie paces the action better and highlights those parallels differently. The same themes are played out in the past, present, and future versions; at its root the story is about acceptance of death. The art by Kent Williams is beautiful, though the old-school comic lettering used for the dialogue and thoughts seemed inappropriate stylistically.

The movie is particularly interesting as the budget was kept small primarily through using macro photography techniques to achieve the special effects. How is using deep-sea microorganisms photographed in 3D cheaper than computers? Weird, but it looks pretty amazing on film.