Movie Review DOUBLE-DIP: Melancholia and MI 4

Melancholia:

          Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, starring Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kiefer Sutherland and that guy from True Blood and Generation Kill:



(Alexander Skarsgard) And so many other talented people that I’m, frankly, flabbergasted the movie wasn’t more widely released... Wait, no I’m not: Melancholia is a beautiful (the shots/lighting/misenscene, the pace, the music), mesmerising film about how we--you, me, and everyone else we know--deal with our awareness of our own mortality, of what Hegel/others have called the “Absolute Master” (death).

Option 1: Avoid thinking about it, but also secretly obsess about it (Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character’s response).

Option 2: Lie to ourselves about it/make up comforting stories that make it seem less scary, less abyssal, less unknowable (the child in the film’s response).

            Option 3: Live as if we’re already dead (Kirsten Dunst’s character’s response), i.e., mourn the loss of life prior to losing it (MELANCHOLIA, also what most people understand Socrates to be saying in The Apology about what it means to be a philosopher...).
            Option 4: Lie to others about it while, supposedly, being honest with ourselves (Kiefer’s character’s response).


Mission Impossible 4:

            In MI 4, we’re also... ALL GOING TO DIE!!!

However, unlike Melancholia and its fateful, lovely blue-green planet, our mortality will be wrought upon us by human hands and nuclear weapons:

In MI 4, however, we’re presented with an alternative to the above four possible responses, a possible response that was GLARINGLY absent in Melancholia (as a function of just how sh*tty/broken everyone in that film was): Have a “well-functioning team,” i.e., surround ourselves with people we can trust to help us face death with courage, integrity, laughter, etc...

           Of course, in MI 4, the well-functioning team manages to avoid their deaths; Tom Cruise proving himself to still be the immortal Lestat:
 


Unfortunately for the rest of us, we’re just not vampires, ultimately. Actually, fortunately for the rest of us...