I've said this a lot in the past twenty-four hours, but some movies are so good that I can't watch them more than once. Requiem for a Dream falls into that category. I've actually seen it a few times, but I don't really want to watch it again. Melancholia elicited the same reaction. A good fake title might read: When Planets Collide and Kill Rich People. It's a little more descriptive, but doesn't really do the film justice.
Kirsten Dunst acts for once and plays a wonderful, clinically depressed woman who just got married. She ruins her marriage that same night in and evening of character exposition both entertaining and painful. The second half of the movie proceeds to reveal who the main characters actually are and return them to likeability while we come to realize their inevitable death is coming very soon.
Melancholia walks a fine line between plain old fiction and sci-fi. A rogue planet nearly missing Earth in a "fly by" and getting sucked back into our gravitational wake (or something) to collide with us and kill us all in a fiery death sounds like a classic science fiction plot. Thankfully, Lars Von Trier decided you don't need to explain all the phenomena in the movie in order to make it feasible. The audience just needs enough to suspend dis-belief. My favorite touch was when the planets got close enough for Melancholia's (that's the rogues planet's name) gravity sucked away some of the Earth's atmosphere.
Confrontation with the question "what do you do when you know the world is going to end in an unavoidable, cataclysmic cosmic event?" felt a little daunting coming dazed out of the theater. A movie capable of giving you the intense desire to not sleep alone tonight can definitely be considered well made. Kudos to you, Lars, and fuck you.
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