Preview: Melancholia

R for colliding planets, colliding aesthetics, Hollywood cliche of building your big-budget disaster film around a protagonist with untreatable depression

Release Date: November 11, 2011

The science fiction tropes are all too familiar. A doomed planet as a metaphor for depression. Colliding celestial bodies as a a visual incarnation of the strange, destructive beauty that people can find in their own despair. A slow, bleak look at the end of days, with no hero to be found.

You know – the same high-minded art-house stuff that we’ve seen in everything from The Core to I, Robot.

And Lars von Trier – an unpredictable maker of porno films, given to praising Hitler at film festivals, then apologizing, then retracting the apology - is a walking stereotype of the geeky sci-fi director. ~Ben Orlin