Luc Besson’s new film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets has an opening sequence better than most full movies I’ve seen all year. And then the rest of the film unfortunately happens.
Valerian is based on an old French sci-fi comic that I’ve never seen before. It’s set hundreds of years in the future where space cops Valerian and Laureline (played by Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevine) work to save Alpha 1: The City of a Thousand Planets. In those great opening moments, the film shows us American and Soviet astronauts meeting and shaking hands in space in 1975. And then it flashes forward to other nationalities meeting in orbit, and it shows the growth of the space station as more and more nations – and eventually more and more alien species – welcome each other. The space station grows into this huge and messy self-contained world, populated by millions of humans and aliens working together. It’s a great example of simple visual storytelling, set to the tune of Space Oddity.
Unfortunately, it’s also one of the last moments the film makers ever give the audience any credit. This is a movie with cliched, ham-fisted dialog sandwiched between some of the clumsiest exposition I’ve seen in a long time. We get random flashbacks and terrible ADR to remind us of things that didn’t happen that long ago and we haven’t forgotten.
This is all uttered by one – maybe two – grossly miscast actors. Dane Dehaan is supposed to be playing a bad ass ladies man space cop and he just looks like he’s twelve. He can’t pull of a roguish character… the part needed someone bigger, handsomer, and more devilish. Delevine does a better job in general but there’s only so much she can do with this dialog. On top of that, they play characters who banter and bicker with each other over their shared romantic interest… but they have no chemistry and their dialog is just a bunch of tired cliches.
Now, the movie is peek pulp sci-fi otherwise. And that’s either very good or very bad. It shares a lot of DNA with the far superior Fifth Element which is also by Luc Besson. But it’s got some Guardians of Galaxy and Star Wars in there too. The film is bright, colorful, and pretty imaginative though in a way that you’ve kind of seen before. Since this is based on an old comic, it’s possible they are just emulating what was done (and copied) in those pages. But it does look good even though you’re often reminded of others things. Like, “Hey, they look like they are wearing N7 armor from Mass Effect… and those robots look like Geth… and if those aliens were any bluer, they’d be right out of Avatar.”
So the movie runs about 2 hrs and 20 minutes and is often a weird, rambling distracted mess. There’s a bunch of scenes that just seem like random, aimless wandering from the plot. For example, the movie takes a weird interlude to show Rhianna (yes, that Rhianna) doing a burlesque act with magic sci-fi clothing transfer powers. I’m not saying its poorly done, but it feels like a distraction, not to mention stunt casting that ultimately goes nowhere but it goes nowhere for longer than it should. It’s like the aria scene in The Fifth Element only with less of an impact on the movie.
Action scenes aren’t particularly very well done either – a lot of it just feels like a mess of CGI splattered on screen. Or maybe the problem is I can barely work myself up to care about these miscast characters and they haven’t really given me a reason to care about the danger the city is in.
I will give it this much credit – while the dialog is bad, the story is all right. I kept mentally comparing it to Jupiter Ascending, another big pulpy sci-fi flick. That movie was unrelentingly dumb on top of all its other problems. Valerian isn’t stupid, the dialog and the characters are just bad. It’s a fine-line distinction between a laughably bad movie and one that’s just kind of mediocre.
So the movie is a bit of a hot mess… but then, dammit, the final thirty minutes actually work. It doesn’t fully save the flick but at least I was drawn into the plot and even the chunky dialog started to work.
It’s hard to forgive the previous hour and forty-five minutes but if you love your pulp sci-fi in the vein of Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy mixed with The Fifth Element, then maybe this is something you’d have fun with. I don’t think other people will be able to take any of this seriously enough to really get into it though. It’s kind of impenetrably goofy for more serious-minded folk.
Score: 71