Remarkably, The Last Son of Celeste is a student film. I can hardly believe it. The special effects are astonishing, and the outdoor/landscape shots are nothing short of breathtaking. If someone had made this in a film production class when I was in college, my head would have exploded.

It’s a love story crossed with a science-fiction movie. Just a hunch, but I think it’s at least partially inspired by Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, which shares some of the same storytelling tricks and visual cues. Like The Fountain, not everything in this shorter film (21 minutes) works, but it’s easier to forgive a student filmmaker for making mistakes. And those mistakes don’t diminish the film’s considerable accomplishments.

It opens with a clunky description of a dystopian future world in which man has lost a five-century war against “The Overmind.” We never learn exactly what The Overmind is, and it’s never mentioned again. The opening also tells us that a hero is searching for humanity’s last hope, the Junipero. All of these elements could have easily been taken out; they don’t add anything except conception. And while the story that follows isn’t completely comprehensible, it’s compelling in its own right and doesn’t benefit from the expositional stuff at the beginning.

We see the hero on his quest after the 500-year war, and we see him in flashback scenes with his lover, Cassie. She also appears in the present-day scenes, seemingly reincarnated. (All of this is open to interpretation; you could argue that the present-day scenes are actually fantasies.) The movie skips back and forth and repeats scenes, much like The Fountain. They also share a common theme about the timelessness of love and how soul mates can’t be separated by the distance of time and space.

I want to stress that The Last Son of Celeste stands on its own. I think the director, Marlon Torres, had more ideas than he was able to fit onto the screen, but what he was able to fit is pretty awesome.