Two movies that seem similar in their apocalyptic vision are The Fountain, which should have been called The Tree of Life or First Father, and Knowing. Both had those scenes of transformation. In The Fountain the transformations are the 16th-century man drinking the sap of the tree and turning into the grass and flowers, the journey of First Father to the star/galaxy far away, the Rachel Weisz character dying and being given an green burial so that she may fertilize a tree.
In Knowing the obvious transformation is of the children being carried off in spaceships to another planet as the earth burns up, but the Nicholas Cage character and his family are also metamorphosed as they are killed in the flash of the sun flare. They come together, father mother son daughter, united after years of discord between father and son, and hold each other in the face of the burning wind, declaring their belief in the Afterlife. A beautiful “biblical” scene, a metamorphosis of the spirit. Amazing films both of them.
