November 24, 2011 -- The title of this movie “Melancholia” is a dead giveaway on several levels. With a name like that, you know this film isn't going to be in any way inspiring, uplifting, fun, entertaining or positive, and it isn't. You also know, from the title that this is at least intended to be an art film, which in some circles at least, is a license to bore. What you don't get from the title is that this is a very un-scientific science fiction film, or that it is an anti-intellectual film about the triumph of insanity over rationality.

The opening seven minute sequence of this film is filled with astonishing images that are at times magical, at other times disturbing (dead birds falling from the sky, dying horses, etc.). This sequence foreshadows the events to come, including the total destruction of the earth, just to make sure there are no surprises of any kind in store for the audience. One tip-off is the Ophelia-like image of the heroine floating away in dark water. If only she disappeared that fast. The rest of the film is a less elegant regurgitation of those first seven minutes.

The rest of the film is split into chapters, the first of which is devoted to the heroine of the story, the creepy bride, Justine (played by Kirstin Dunst of the “Spider-Man” movies). Justine is marrying a man she clearly doesn't love. In fact she can barely manage to get out of bed to attend her own wedding due to her melancholia, but she does have the energy to escape from her husband, leaving him alone on their wedding night bed in order to have anonymous sex with a wedding guest in the sand trap of a golf course. Now that is classy, and itchy. She also tells off her evil boss and loses her job on the same night. Justine's mother, Gaby (Charlotte Rampling of “Never Let Me Go”) doesn't believe in marriages and refuses to come out of her room for her daughter's wedding reception. Justine's brother-in-law, John (Keiffer Sutherland of the TV series “24”) is outraged, asking his wife Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg of “21 Grams”) “is everybody in your family stark raving mad?” Good question, except it is an insult to Claire.

John is especially angry because he is footing the bill for the ridiculously expensive wedding, including a huge stretch limo that can't negotiate the narrow, winding road to the wedding site, John's enormous mansion, complete with an 18-hole golf course. The wedding planner is also furious. This is probably the worst investment John, an extremely wealthy man, has ever made (he was probably unaware of my wedding theorem that the length of a marriage is inversely proportional to the cost of the wedding). Justine and her mother could be excused for taking baths in the middle of the festivities, which seem to go on forever. This includes a prize for guessing the number of beans in a container. This interminable wedding party takes nearly half the film at over one hour, but it seems longer than that. It is made even more unbearable because so many guests seem to hate each other. These are not the kind of people you want spend time with at a party.

Once you get past the wedding, the film improves slightly in the second half as a giant planet called Melancholia is discovered hurtling towards the earth. Nobody, except Justine, noticed it before because it was “hiding behind the sun.” This, of course is impossible for a number of reasons. For one thing, the gravitational influence of this planet would be detected long before it became visible. Most of the earth's top scientists say Melancholia will pass close to the earth, but the two planets will not collide. Justine, however, knows the end of the world is at hand. She knew this on her wedding night, which may be why she acted as if nothing mattered anymore. John is sure the earth will survive. Claire sees web pages on the internet about the impending end of the world, a “dance of death” of the two planets and begins to prepare for the worst. Even the butler quits, wanting to spend his last days with his family.

John is convinced the family will be safe and that the “fly by” of the planet will be a spectacular sight to behold. John is an astronomy buff with a large, expensive-looking refractor telescope in the yard. Justine, who is in such a funk she sleeps all day and doesn't have the energy to take a bath, begins to perk up and get stronger as Melancholia gets closer. She tells Claire, “I know things.” Among the things she knows are that the earth will be destroyed soon. She knows the exact number of beans (678) in the bottle at the wedding, by intuition. She knows the earth is evil and that won't be missed in the universe. She knows the earth is the only planet in the entire universe with life on it. In fact, she knows none of this because she is insane. There is an easy way to fix this little problem with the script. I'll get to it in the epilogue of this review.

The statements that the earth is evil and that no other life exists are absurd. This is essentially a view of the universe from the Dark Ages, when the earth was thought to be the center of everything and man was the measure of all things. It also goes to the heart of what some pessimists believe, and that is that people are basically evil. This movie is a complete affirmation of pessimism. The hero of the story is insane, while rational people are shown to be wrong, even though they are not wrong at all. At the end, she is the strongest character. The foolish optimists are weak and defeated in the end. They cannot face up to the truth with any courage, like pessimists can, according to this story.

The idea that earth is the only planet with life flies in the face of what is now known about the universe. It is likely there are a billion planets out there like earth (there are an estimated 100 billion planets in the Milky Way Galaxy alone, and there are billions of galaxies) in the universe we can see. The earth is not unique and probably life is not unique to earth. There could even be life elsewhere in our own solar system, and probably there are multiple instances of intelligent life in rest of the universe, and that is just our universe. New findings in physics give support the idea that there are billions, perhaps trillions of universes (existing in a multiverse in which new universes are constantly being created). There could be an infinite number of universes in which readers identical to you are reading articles identical to the one you are reading right now. There could also be multiple dimensions, each with a virtually infinite number of universes in them.

Man is no longer the measure of all things, as he seems to be in this film. Now we know the earth is not the center of anything. It isn't unique. It will eventually be destroyed by the sun, or by some other means, and it won't be missed (unless humans colonize other worlds by then). That much is true. However, the idea that we are alone in the universe as living beings becomes increasingly more absurd with every discovery of a new solar system, and with the mounting evidence that there are untold billions of universes, as well as multiple dimensions.

The idea that the “earth is evil” displays a similarly stunted view of the universe, the world, and life. It is true there are evil people, and maybe some evil animals, but the bulk of people and the trillions of other forms of life on the earth don't qualify for a blanket label of evil. Are trees evil? Grass? Plankton? Fish? It is an absurd statement, and it is an insult to all of life, including most of the 7 billion humans on this planet.

The “dance of death” diagram in the film shows fundamental scientific ignorance. The diagram, supposedly accurate, at least in Justine's mind, shows Melancholia, which appears to be much more massive than earth, making a sharp loop around the earth, which is impossible, then making a loop around nothing (also impossible since you need a gravitational body like another massive planet, or the sun, or a black hole to make a planet loop like this and change direction by 180 degrees). The idea that a huge, fast-moving planet could make two 180-degree turns in a matter of hours without sufficient gravitational fields (such as a couple of conveniently-placed black holes) to induce those sharp turns is impossible. After the second u-turn, around nothing, Melancholia then heads back towards the earth and overtakes it from behind, catching up to the earth in its orbit around the sun. This is nonsense. It is impossible as shown. It ignores Newton's laws of motion.

If a massive planet like Melancholia came as close to the earth as depicted in the movie, it would cause massive earthquakes and destructive tides. It would alter the orbit of the earth, but it wouldn't make a sharp loop around the earth, then make another loop around nothing and come back in a matter of a few hours. The closest you could get to that maneuver in real life would take weeks or months, perhaps many years. It would require a loop around the sun, and perhaps another loop around a giant planet like Jupiter as well. I've seen Bugs Bunny cartoons that have a better grasp of science than this movie. Once again, this is essentially the depiction of the triumph of insanity over reason. However, I was rooting for Melancholia to pull off this impossible orbital maneuver so it would finally put this stupid movie out of its misery.

The science of this movie is wacky, on so many levels. How is it as a drama? It is a lot more successful as a drama, but it suffers from a dearth of tolerable characters. There are too many characters who are really mean-spirited people that I would cross the street to stay away from. Claire and her son, Leo (Cameron Spurr) are nice enough, but they are overshadowed by Justine and all the other creepy characters in the film. The only way you will find this film to be tolerable is if you are a pessimist. It has a pessimistic hero that maybe you can identify with. It might help if you know as little as possible about science. It might also help if you have contempt for the entire human race. Me? I couldn't wait for it to be over. It rates a D. There are some neat-looking images, however, if you can get past the annoying camera motion in most scenes.

There is an easy fix for all the scientific problems in this film, and that is of course that Justine wakes up at the end of it to find out it is all a dream (a nightmare for the rest of us, a nice dream for her) or a hallucination. My dream ending would have Justine waking up in a mental hospital like the one in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” with a couple of doctors standing over her, saying “Poor girl. She's gone off the deep end again. Let's see if electro shock therapy helps.” This would, of course fix all the film's many scientific problems, but it would not allow for the triumph of insanity over reason, which, unfortunately, seems to be its goal.

Another fix would be to introduce a supernatural element into the film. If the destruction of the earth is a result of divine intervention, god's will, then you can discount Newton's laws of motion. There are hints of this in the film when the story suggests the earth itself is “evil.” The film's view of the universe is also medieval in some ways. If the earth is evil, then perhaps it deserves the death penalty. That seems way harsh, for the reasons stated above, but this allegorical interpretation makes more sense than trying to view this movie as simile, syllogism or metaphor, at least in the classical sense of those terms. The problem is this movie doesn't present itself as an allegory. It presents itself as a straight drama with overtones of dumb science fiction. That is a real problem.

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