Anyone ever play Majora’s Mask? Lars von Trier apparently did. That’s weird thought. The nihilistic manufactured genius of a Danish film director playing a Nintendo game. He’s a weird dude, though—I wouldn’t put it past him.

Anyway.

Melancholia involves a planet named Melancholia vacationing through our solar system. Earth may or may not be in its way, which means that the end of the world may or may not be possible. Melancholia is basically a disaster film, though, which means that the ending is determined outright and that, yes, the Earth is destroyed. This is the cool part.

The rest of the movie revolves around two sisters and their immediate family. This is the less cool part. The most interesting thing here is that their husbands are, in light of the end of the world, portrayed as weak and cowardly, and the sisters are righteous ones who see Mother Earth through to her fiery end. This is a noted turnaround from the misogyny of Trier’s previous film, Antichrist, which was founded on the premise that a mother would rather experience an orgasm than stop her son from jumping out of a window. Melancholia is less fucked up than Antichrist, but is also less interesting.

Trier wants to use the end of the world as a metaphor to make some sort of statement on depression, specifically, that depressed people stay cool like Fonzie in extreme situations. I guess this is worth exploring. Honestly, though, when Kirsten Dunst as Justine, one of the sisters, utters things like “Life is only on Earth, and not for long,” I can’t take the movie very seriously. Nihilism, I think, is only attractive to other nihilists. Personally, I liked E.T., so I didn’t care too much for this sort of thing.

I was really only enthralled in Melancholia when it was ripping off 2001: A Space Odyssey and setting wondrous celestial bodies, locked in a dance of death in the depths of space, to classical music. I also liked the prominence of Kirsten Dunst’s breasts. Trier certainly didn’t shy away from them, and for good reason. When Justine strips to the nude and bathes herself in the glow of the mysterious rogue planet, now a fixation of the night sky like the moon, it’s easy to think of her breasts as celestial bodies all their own. Now that’s a metaphor I can get behind.