Melancholia

Not to ramble strongly for or against this film, I can see why many people would love it and why many people would hate it. It's very unusual of a movie, has a strong feeling of artisticness, which gives it an advantage.

Unfortunately it hardly has any story or plot and barely anything happens in the film, as well as the two main parts are totally incohesive. The first half of the movie is about a depressed sister getting married, which shows a really strong depth to her hopelessness.

However, half way through the movie, it switches focus to the other sister, where miraculously, everyone else in the film but the sisters, her son, and her husband, simply leave. The entire second half of the film really has no connection to the first half except that it shares 3 of the same characters. Mid-film, it switches from a drama to a sci-fi, and I'm still at a loss whether to like the idea or abhor it.

There really is no cohesiveness to the two parts of the movie, so it almost seems like the writer either couldn't think of a full-length script and put two separate ones together, or thought it would be clever/genius to do so. The second part, given that there are only 3 characters (other than a little boy), is dull. The majority of the dialogue (and there is little) is a back-and-forth paranoid conversation with the husband and wife about whether or not this planet in the sky is going to hit the earth. There is no actual conflict, nothing that can be done about it, and totally makes no sense as a film, except to convey something apparently profound about the human soul or something. I dunno.

The constant replaying of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde as the entirety of the film's soundtrack gets quite annoying fairly quickly. Especially when it's the same part played over and over.

Two final things leave me with a sense of frustration/disappointment. The film's climax is the collision of this blue planet with earth and the characters do nothing in the film other than pointless dialog and running around. The film ends quite suddenly and while the cinematography seems beautiful, I really wonder what the whole point was. There was no story other than what can be described in a short sentence: Two sisters, a husband and their small boy are at a hotel golf resort to observe a blue planet 'moving past' Earth, mostly with dialog of depression and paranoia, when in fact it ends up colliding. The end.

My final gripe is Kiefer Sutherland's character. As an astronomer, he observes this blue projectile planet and is convinced that it will just pass Earth by. Yet when he realizes it doesn't, he ends up committing suicide, leaving his wife and young son behind. I can understand fear and hopelessness and surprise on his part, but what the heck kind of father/husband leaves his wife/child behind when the world is going to end, not doing everything possible to protect/comfort/care for them? It was stupid and didn't add anything to the story other than make me not like it. Not just the character, but the movie as a whole. Why would I want to spend 2 hours of my time watching dullness and nothingness that just is meant to make me feel depressed? It's artistic and beautiful, but sometimes making art into a film just doesn't work for me.