I had heard mixed things about Melancholia when it came out, and I really wasn't sure what to expect when I started it. And even after I started it, it still took a while to figure it out, since the story was a bit slow to get going.
It opens with what I imagine to be Tree of Life-style montages of stars and planets colliding (although I never saw Tree of Life, so I can't be positive about that). That is all you get in terms of setting though, and it takes a long time to get back to the central conflict of the film - which is the impending passage of Earth by a nearby planet, Melancholia.
So, plot. The movie starts with the wedding of a girl we come to discover is very unbalanced. Once the wedding ends, her husband disappears from the film and it focuses on the relationship between the bride, her sister, and her sister's husband. It is a weird relationship indeed, with very little back story. You're just dropped into the lives of these people and have to figure it out as you go. As the possibility of a planetary collision grows, the bride seems to grow calmer while her sister becomes more and more unstable, and the sister's husband is a mystery all his own.
As an editing note, the volume differentials in this movie are maddening! I don't think I ever put down the remote because I constantly had to turn it way up or way down as the scenes changed from dramatic music (which I liked) to hushed whispers.
Bottom line: lots of interesting visuals, but I found it to be lacking in purpose.
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