Melancholia

Lars Von Trier and an apocalyptic movie. What does 2 have to do with it?
So much or nothing depending on your point of view.
Don't expect people running and screaming, monsters in the streets, tsunamis, bloody deaths and special effects.
This is an intimist film to the nth power and existential.
It is a film that tries to imagine what our reaction would be to an imminent and inevitable catastrophic event.
Because Melancholia hasn't been hiding since the beginning.
Earth is about to be annihilated by another planet.
It is the failure of science and reason, the victory of nature over the artifact, chaotic and cynical world of man.

Melancholia is coming.
The melancholy comes.
Is that what we should expect at the end of our days?
How would we feel?
And would it matter?
There would be no other opportunity to repair our mistakes, to improve, to correct the course.
One planet comes and destroys another and with it all its inhabitants.
Kirsten Dunst is fabulous because she delivers an almost astounding surrender in front of a moment like this.
There is no escape and yet some people hope that that event will not happen that for some reason the planet Melancholia decides to stop before the impact and go back.
It's the arrogance of man.
A human being convinced that nature owes him something, owes him something.
A cocky man, so cocky that he feels at the center of the world and not an integral part of the universe.
But the end comes, for everyone.
Eventually.
And when the entire human race dies, it is only a more shared but no less painful suffering.
It is a continuous going back and forth, back and forth with the images that of Von Trier, a desire to show us how useless life was at the moment when death, annihilation comes inexorable.
Why live if you have to die?
No such answer.
There is life between the question and the answer.
But if life itself ceases, the human being itself, what does the answer matter?
Or rather, what does the question matter?!
It's a subtle, claustrophobic nihilism.
It's the ultimate disaster movie. A film that confronts us with death due to an inevitable natural disaster that is bigger than us. A disaster that we could not avoid, simply because we are the ones who are weaker than nature.
We discovered the laws of physics, but we didn't invent them.
They've existed since the day the universe was created.
We are the guests.
Desired or not, we can be wiped out in no time at all.
Despair is assailing.
The breath gets shorter.
Life slips away.
Forever.