For me, the biggest issue about Lars Von Trier's "Melancholia" is that it deals with the issue of depression but pretty much every character in the movie should be depressed. Kirsten Dunst gives a tremendous performance (Side note: while this has been a crap year for movies, nobody told the actors as this is a year filled with standout performances) as a woman struggling with her emotions but, given her situation, she pretty much should be depressed. Her parents are a mess and make no bones about letting everyone see it, even at their daughter's wedding. Her boss is overbearing and kind of a douche. Her husband-to-be is kind of an oaf. Because of this, the first half of the movie was less a study of depression and more of a situation that would have most sane people would be reaching for the pills.

I felt the film picked up a bit in the second half, which focuses more on Dunst's character's more straight-laced sister. But the fact that the film was split into two halves kind of weakened the overall story. Breaking up the film into two separate part and investigating the sister's essentially individually took away from the film's power. I think if the entire film unfolded during or just after the wedding reception, it would have been a much crisper film.

In the end, I think this film kind of breaks the Too Many Leaps rule. You can ask an audience to take one giant leap with you but when you require them to suspend disbelief a second time, you're asking for trouble.. This film deals with an absolutely insane family AND the fact that a planet that was hidden behind the Sun for all this time might be crashing into the Earth. In fact, the latter is actually the more believable of those two leaps, although for those expecting a sci-fi film, the end of the world element is barely handled and as vague of an apocalypse as I've ever seen (admittedly, I zoned out at moments but it seemed like it should have been a bit more of a topic of conversation. The end of the world was nearby and it seemed like only a couple of people were pre-occupied by it).

The film comes together nicely but I just felt that the journey wasn't worth the destination.