Mischief Maker wrote:

I didn't like this movie, and according to comments in reply to other reviews, this movie wasn't for me since I never suffered from clinical depression. Apparently if I did, I would think this fucking movie had a happy ending.

I have 2 theories about what Lars Von Trier was trying to accomplish with this movie. One was the ultimate Mary Sue story for people with depression...

So I guess the moral of the film is that people with depression are horrible selfish assholes who would rather quelch their bad feelings in a horrific disaster that would silence every living thing on the planet than take their fucking meds. Or as Jim Norton puts it, "MEEEEEEEEEE!"

My other theory is that Von Trier really wanted to film Kirsten Dunst nude, and so crafted an oscar-bait crazy person role for her that would require a gratiutous nude scene for "Artistic" purposes. Proof for this is how Dunst's cleavage is dead center in every single shaky handheld camera shot in the movie.

Jro wrote:

Ever since the Godfather pictures, it seems, artiness has been working overtime as a kind of built-in alibi for many of the baser impulses in the audience –- various kinds of cynicism viewing corruption as inescapable, everyday, and deeply profound (e.g., Avatar, The Girlfriend Experience, Contagion), extreme violence as a function of specious and hypocritical morality (or, even worse, “sensitivity,” as in Drive – or, for that matter, The Passion of the Christ), gimmicky temporal structures (e.g., Tarantino, Memento, Babel) or fatuous psychologizing that are somehow supposed to dignify various forms of boorishness or nastiness (ranging from McQueen’s sexist complacencies and brutalities in Shame to von Trier’s dubious and ongoing validation of his own depression as a practical tool for coping with glitzy catastrophes and atrocities of his own making), and even the sort of Oscar-mongering that can cast a liberal activist (Woody Harrelson) as a racist thug (Rampart) to show us how “complex” the modern world is supposed to be.