I expected something a little weirder from Valerian. The trailers and publicity materials pushed the sheer number of bizarre aliens and incredible vistas that Luc Besson has gone to lengths to recreate in the most expensive independent film in history. However, underneath the admittedly spectacular visuals and quirky asides, Valerian's story is very straightforward and pretty ordinary.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is based on a long-running French comic, Valerian et Laureline, which ran all the way from 1967 to 2010. Like many in the English-speaking world, I've never read it, although I am aware that it has had a big influence on many science fantasy writers, artists and creators over the years. This makes it hard to say whether Besson drew on other space adventure properties when he wrote and directed the movie. I'd expect it to look and feel a lot like his previous fantasy epic, The Fifth Element, but Valerian also has a distinct feel of Star Wars in many sequences. Is Besson drawing on the biggest space fantasy series ever, or is it simply that George Lucas was influenced by Valerian et Laureline as much as people say?
The opening of the film is just perfect, taking us on a tour through the history of space travel and particularly, the development of a huge space station in Earth orbit. It drifts from 2001 evocative realistic hardware to Star Trek-like interstellar diplomacy. It's exactly how I'd open a grand space opera. It introduces the primary setting of the movie, a gigantic conglomeration of alien environments clustered around the onetime space station named Alpha, the so-called City of a Thousand Planets.
Visually, the film is absolutely incredible. I've said before that modern sci-fi blockbusters have become essentially animated films, and Valerian takes this trend further even than Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy. Save for a handfull of scenes, almost every moment in the movie is filled with CG aliens of all shapes and sizes, or against a background of mind-boggling cityscapes, impossibly deep caverns and alien palaces. The most inventive environment appears early in the film, at the Big Market, a huge bazaar that exists in two different dimensional plains (and there was me thinking it was in Newcastle).
There's no faulting the look of the film, it's array of extraterrestrials or its fabulous locations. However, they make for a background for quite uninteresting human characters. Valerian and Laureline, spatio-temporal agents for the Human Federation, are played by Dane DeHaan and Cara Delavingne, who are very pretty but don't add a lot else. Neither actor has a great deal of charisma to me, and the two baby-faced space agents don't inspire much interest as protagonists. The actors also lack chemistry with each other, which is a problem when a laboured romance is at the heart of the story. You know the sort of thing - he sees himself as a bad boy, she thinks she's too good for him, they love each other really, surely he'll break through her shell, etc. Seen it a thousand times before.
The central plot concerns the fate of the planet Muul, a lost paradise world once inhabited by peculiar, beautiful and quite dull alien beings. There's a rot at the heart of the Federation, and the disenfranchised aliens hold the truth. Perfectly solid, if unoriginal material, and the plot chugs along quite nicely. It's energetic and fun, and there are some very entertaining action set pieces. The problem is that I can't find myself caring much about either the two leads or the pacifistic aliens. I'm more interested in the various ne'er-do-wells we glimpse in the Big Market and in the underworld of Alpha. The best character is a shapeshifting coelenterate who doesn't even make it till the end of the second act, but at least she's a sexy invertebrate and is played by Rihanna.
Good fun and very pretty, but two-dimensional and with some truly terrible dialogue. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed it, but given the choice, I'm never going to put Valerian on instead of Guardians of the Galaxy or Star Wars, or, for that matter, The Fifth Element.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is based on a long-running French comic, Valerian et Laureline, which ran all the way from 1967 to 2010. Like many in the English-speaking world, I've never read it, although I am aware that it has had a big influence on many science fantasy writers, artists and creators over the years. This makes it hard to say whether Besson drew on other space adventure properties when he wrote and directed the movie. I'd expect it to look and feel a lot like his previous fantasy epic, The Fifth Element, but Valerian also has a distinct feel of Star Wars in many sequences. Is Besson drawing on the biggest space fantasy series ever, or is it simply that George Lucas was influenced by Valerian et Laureline as much as people say?
The opening of the film is just perfect, taking us on a tour through the history of space travel and particularly, the development of a huge space station in Earth orbit. It drifts from 2001 evocative realistic hardware to Star Trek-like interstellar diplomacy. It's exactly how I'd open a grand space opera. It introduces the primary setting of the movie, a gigantic conglomeration of alien environments clustered around the onetime space station named Alpha, the so-called City of a Thousand Planets.
Visually, the film is absolutely incredible. I've said before that modern sci-fi blockbusters have become essentially animated films, and Valerian takes this trend further even than Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy. Save for a handfull of scenes, almost every moment in the movie is filled with CG aliens of all shapes and sizes, or against a background of mind-boggling cityscapes, impossibly deep caverns and alien palaces. The most inventive environment appears early in the film, at the Big Market, a huge bazaar that exists in two different dimensional plains (and there was me thinking it was in Newcastle).
There's no faulting the look of the film, it's array of extraterrestrials or its fabulous locations. However, they make for a background for quite uninteresting human characters. Valerian and Laureline, spatio-temporal agents for the Human Federation, are played by Dane DeHaan and Cara Delavingne, who are very pretty but don't add a lot else. Neither actor has a great deal of charisma to me, and the two baby-faced space agents don't inspire much interest as protagonists. The actors also lack chemistry with each other, which is a problem when a laboured romance is at the heart of the story. You know the sort of thing - he sees himself as a bad boy, she thinks she's too good for him, they love each other really, surely he'll break through her shell, etc. Seen it a thousand times before.
The central plot concerns the fate of the planet Muul, a lost paradise world once inhabited by peculiar, beautiful and quite dull alien beings. There's a rot at the heart of the Federation, and the disenfranchised aliens hold the truth. Perfectly solid, if unoriginal material, and the plot chugs along quite nicely. It's energetic and fun, and there are some very entertaining action set pieces. The problem is that I can't find myself caring much about either the two leads or the pacifistic aliens. I'm more interested in the various ne'er-do-wells we glimpse in the Big Market and in the underworld of Alpha. The best character is a shapeshifting coelenterate who doesn't even make it till the end of the second act, but at least she's a sexy invertebrate and is played by Rihanna.
Good fun and very pretty, but two-dimensional and with some truly terrible dialogue. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed it, but given the choice, I'm never going to put Valerian on instead of Guardians of the Galaxy or Star Wars, or, for that matter, The Fifth Element.
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