Valerian Shows Besson Is Missing An Element Or Two
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is full of amazing space opera science fiction concepts, all beautifully realized in gorgeous imagery and dazzling color — wrapped around a weak script, lame dialogue and two leads that have less chemistry than the 12-and-up science set I got as a kid.
I really wanted this to be the spiritual successor to director and script writer Luc Besson’s brilliant space opera (literally) The Fifth Element. Alas, at best it is maybe three fifths of that movie. Below is my mostly spoiler-free review of Valerian, with no more details than you would have garnered from watching the trailers and commercials. OK, not much more, because I have to mention one minor story element to explain one stupid goof.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is based on a French comic series that ran from 1967 to 2010. The movie drops the time travel elements that were just as common as the space travel in the comics, but keeps much of the tone. Valerian is a Bond-like womanizer, and a dedicated soldier. Laureline is smart, forward and emblematic of the overall tone of the comics — macho is foolish, brains and passion are good. And there is the first problem, the casting of the leads. Dane DeHaan (Chronicle, The Amazing Spider-Man 2) and Cara Delevingne (Enchantress in Suicide Squad) both look like they just graduated from high school. But Valerian in the comics is very much the square-jawed athletic classic hero type. He and Laureline should evoke Bond and Emma Peele, not Harry Osborn and Gwen Stacey.
DeHaan is OK as Valerian, but he certainly shows no indications of being the next young DiCaprio that some thought he would be after Chronicle. And while Delevingne is noticeably better than she was in Suicide Squad (how could she not be?) she is still the worst actor in the cast, and she is the co-lead. With the exception of a ham-fisted Clive Owen, the secondary characters are the best ones in the movie, and the most well acted. Herbie Hancock is surprisingly solid, Ethan Hawke is a hoot, and Rihanna is the best thing about the movie for the most part. It’s a problem when your co-lead (Delevingne) has twice as many acting credits as Rihanna, and Rihanna eats her lunch.
It is the scene shown in the trailer of Rihanna dancing and shapeshifting that is indicative of the structure problems of the movie. It stops the story and action of the film cold, for what amounts to a Rihanna music video. I think Besson was trying to capture the same beauty and glory he did with the diva Plavalaguna’s aria in The Fifth Element, but he forgot one huge factor — in that movie, the diva’s singing acts as an emotional current for what is happening with Leeloo in another part of the ship. Here it’s just voyeurism by Valerian, to push home a story point that could have been accepted by us with a single shape change.
It is pretty frustrating that the filmmaker behind The Professional and The Fifth Element made Lucy and now this pretty wide miss. I can see the film this almost was quite often. It at times smacks of a combination of The Fifth Element and David Brin’s Uplift novel series. There are thousands of aliens races (and certainly dozens of them on screen) and all kinds of different alien technologies, much like in Brin’s Five Galaxies. But rather than using any of this as a story element, it is simply window dressing for a story that is set nearly 500 years in the future, and yet one high-ranking soldier is clearly wielding an M4A assault rifle with an LED stick on the front.
Don’t get me wrong — that window dressing is worth the price of admission. Valerian is a absolute feast of imagery for the eyes and concepts for the brain. It doesn’t linger too long on any one amazing thing to make it overstay its welcome, and it doesn’t fall into the trap of lengthy explanations of the aliens and worlds, a few bits of justified exposition aside. When the story works it works well. Even the few amusing set pieces are enjoyable and do drive the plot along, even if none of them are as funny as Ruby Rhod.
Unfortunately, Besson makes the same mistake he made in Lucy. He tries to make the science aspects of the science fiction sound good, but gets things horribly wrong. And here’s where we get to that minor story spoiler — the City of a Thousand Planets started out as a space station in Earth orbit, and eventually has to leave. So it sets out on a trip out into the stars. Four hundred years later when the movie is set, someone mentions that it has traveled “700 million miles.” I don’t know if Besson meant to write “light years,” because 700 million miles puts it just inside the orbit of Saturn. Our 1980s vintage space probes could do that in four years, not 400.
If you like beautiful conceptual science fiction, go see Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Unless you have a 60-inch 4K TV at home, don’t see the spectacle that is this movie on anything but a big screen. But don’t go expecting it to be another The Fifth Element, or even a coherent, enjoyable, well-acted story.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (PG-13, too many production companies to list) – 2.5 out of 5 stars.
