I watched Melancholia with Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Rampling, and Kiefer Sutherland (amongst others) last night. Anyone else watch this recently (Netflix, of course)? My husband nailed the review for it (without even having watched it) - it was a big, slow bummer. Absolutely gorgeous movie, mind you, but nothing happened until the very end, and it was a long slow time of nothing happening and me wondering why the hell I’m watching this movie, anyway.
Oh, sure, the planet does get blown up at the end, but nothing at all happens until then.
Kirsten Dunst had a very nice wedding dress on for the first half of it, though. I did like that.
Two people above have said nothing happened. But things happened, for example:
She cancelled her wedding and threw away her career by having sex with a groomsman.
Her brother in law killed himself.
A planet slowly approached and finally engulfed the Earth, destroying everyone and everything on it.
And another thing that happened, though this was stretched out over the course of the film: She and her sister over the course of the film traded places in terms of who’s the one who’s got it together and who’s the fuckup.
It’s this last one that is the heart of the story IMO.
I saw it in the theater and I found it affecting. Made me rather… melancholy for about a week, in a thoughtful smacked-by-the-sublime environmental angst sort of way. It got to me-- about every other of his movies just kicks my ass like that. The others, eh. Shrug.
I thought I took care of that with the brackets in the OP.
I’m open to the idea that I didn’t understand the movie; I didn’t get much of anything out of it. So the sisters switching roles was the point, eh? I totally didn’t get that.
I saw it when the DVD came out. I thought it was well done and enjoyed the visuals and the atmosphere.
It is a Lars Von Trier film, so I would think you kind of know what to expect going into it.
I think it was one of the main tools used to express the theme of the film. Her depression equipped her to deal with The End Of Everything level-headedly, with poise and sensitivity. Those are traits we would have assigned to her sister as long as we were able to ignore the fact that The End Of Everything was coming.
While things could still sell themelves as “normal,” Dunst’s character seemed childish and impetuous and dysfunctional. But at the end of the film, she was able to justly accuse her sister of childishness, and was able to help her nephew through by modeling calm acceptance, while her sister thrashed around uselessly, her dignity lost, all the way to the final moment.
I really liked the surface elements; namely the tension of the inexorable approach of that planet.
The scene it the beginning from outer space where we see it crash into the earth was excellent.
Later on, as Kiefer is killing himself in the barn, when his wife uses the coat hanger thing to verify the planet is getting further away but it turns out to be so much closer my stomach dropped out. The agonizing dread inspired by that one moment just killed me.
And the final impact was both satisfying and anti-climactic, which was of course fitting because there was no life left in the entire universe to experience a denouement.
They showed the irregular path it took earlier when one of the women was doing internet research. We saw a printout of its path. Here is a link to what the printout looked like from the wikipedia page about the movie. Whether or not that path is plausible is something else, but that’s what we were shown.
I don’t mind a contemplative, slow movie, but I’d like something to happen!
