Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) Review!!!

Synopsis – A dark force threatens Alpha, a vast metropolis and home to species from a thousand planets. Special operatives Valerian and Laureline must race to identify the marauding menace and safeguard not just Alpha, but the future of the universe.

My Take – While most may not consider French director Luc Beeson a high-profile director, even though he has classics such as La Femme Nikita & Léon: The Professional leading his filmography, mainly due to his direct involvement in shoddy action films (like Taken 3) through his EuropaCorp production banner. However, this film, a lifelong passion project for the filmmaker, which is being stated as the most expensive independent film ever made (over $209 million), is surprisingly quite a reminiscent to his best film – the Bruce Willis – Milla Jovovich starring 1997 film The Fifth Element. From the time, the first trailer for this film dropped, I personally was quite intrigued! Mainly as we live in a time when superheroes dominate the spotlight (not that I am complaining exactly), an original film is always going to usher in a sense of warmth. The trailer promised a visually stunning sci-fi adventure based on the French comic series, Valérian and Laureline, created by writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mezieres. A blend of adventure and space opera that went on to influence some of the modern age’s most popular sci-fi/fantasy franchises, including Star Wars, the comic first published in France’s Pilote magazine back in 1968, and only ended pretty recently in 2010, completing an incredibly successful forty-two-year run, which is really a pretty great accomplishment on its own. I’ll be the first to admit that I wasn’t horribly familiar with the source material back when the original trailer dropped, though I’ve picked up a few things in the intervening months and I must say (arguably) considering the film’s plotting & visual extravagance, the film slides in somewhere in between the spectrum of science fictions like the Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending or James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy films. I know it’s a surprise that director Besson’s latest, and biggest film is a delight, a true original that deserves to be remembered despite—or perhaps partly because of—its various silly excesses of being an expensive paint-by-number blockbuster!

The story follows Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne), a pair of spatio-temporal agents, who in 28th century work for the Terran Galactic Empire. Dashing, loyal, but reckless, Valerian is one of the empire’s best agents, as is Laureline, who comes across as a lot more competent than her partner at times. Under assignment from the minister of defense, the duo embarks on a mission to a place called Big Market, an inter-galactic shopping mall that shoppers have to wear virtual reality goggles to access. From here, Valerian and Laureline have to retrieve a cute little creature called a Converter, which can apparently make copies of any substance or material it ingests, and bring it back to Alpha. Little do they know that obtaining the Converter would set off a chain reaction of events that unwittingly sends the duo into an alien race’s bid for survival, one that’s intertwined with intergalactic heavies, shape-shifting dancers, and corrupt government officials, that threatens not just safety of Alpha, but also the Terran Empire itself. Science fiction films nowadays are usually planned as series, with the first entry usually bogged down with world-building and origin-explaining, so they seldom have time for a real story, luckily this one isn’t like that. The plot and the story is easy to follow, with a bit of a montage at the beginning shows how Alpha, the City of a Thousand Planets, came to be, and then we’re thrown right into the story. Events lead into each other easily and naturally, with scenes building on what came before. The film has a decent enough story that somehow fails to really capture your attention or deliver much beyond showing off the film’s visual wonders, but hey! At least it also doesn’t take itself too seriously. The first half of the film is as original and fun as anything director Luc Besson has ever made, however, it’s the second half lurches toward self-parody with bone-headed, atonal creative decisions that I won’t spoil here. As with these kind of films, the dialogue is at times overly expositional, and attempts at humor or romance can be remote and clunky—Besson’s skill as a writer has never been his banter, which this film has plenty of, especially when it’s introducing the dynamic between Valerian and Laureline. Valerian is meant to be arrogant and roguish, a la Han Solo, but DeHaan’s turn resonates more as lecherous. When he and Laureline aren’t in battle, their conversations more or less center around Valerian begging for her love and her saying he’s not ready for commitment, an argument that arises in their first scene and repeats on a loop until the closing moments. It’s a boilerplate dynamic that doesn’t serve to develop either character; it doesn’t help that DeHaan and Delevingne have absolutely zero romantic chemistry, the dialogue is cringe-worthy, and the story is clunky. But stick with it through its awkward early moments, and the film will yield deeper insights into director Besson’s overall artistic philosophy. More words could be spent on the plot or the developing relationship between Valerian and Laureline, but there’s little reason to. The dark secret ultimately leads to a beach planet inhabited by what appears to be a pale, slender civilization of runway models with high cheekbones whose natural resources are magic, life-giving pearls that are pooped out by scaly little genial creatures. The dastardly plot at the center of it all is straightforward enough. But Besson (who also wrote the script) layers in absurd side stories and complicated pieces of world-building, much of it surely straight from the comics, to keep the film’s hefty 137-minute running time from feeling slack. Whatever one may think of Luc Besson’s futuristic space opera , the idea of spending a cool $209 million so that Rihanna can mount a stripper pole and recite some lines from some poem to an audience of one (in full high-tech space suit, sans helmet) in an extraterrestrial red light district named after a lesser-known Sylvester Stallone film with a following among French cinephiles—all while being accompanied on keys by a leather-cowboy-hatted, multi-facial-pierced Ethan Hawke, as a character named Jolly The Pimp—has got to count as some kind of art. Because what’s the point of making stupidly expensive, effects-smothered films if you can’t do things on a whim?

But the film’s power doesn’t come from its cast or its story, and Besson probably didn’t intend for it to. The film’s power is in the construction of its world, which is as vivid as any I’ve seen on film. World building can sometimes serve as a distraction, but here it’s what justifies the bloated runtime. It’s thrilling to see how the Pearls of Mul wash their face, or what tourism looks like on Alpha, or how currency is valued, or how glowing butterflies are used by evil aliens as bait. The first thing you’ll observe about Luc Besson‘s film is how gorgeous it looks; how much work went into the perfect realization of this world. In a time where nearly every blockbuster features tons of CGI, the film stands out and highlights how cheaply the effects are done in most of the other ones. Next, the sheer inventiveness of designers, artists, set builders, wardrobe and makeup – again, makes us painfully realize how off-the-rack and dull most blockbusters are. Add to that Besson’s quirky aesthetics and you’re in a world that’s nearly overpowering you with its inventiveness, its visual splendor, and also plain fun. From an opening that mines every imaginable color from the heavenly beaches of Mul to a climactic showdown within the shadowy intergalactic hub of Alpha, the film is relentless in its creation of intricately detailed fantasy worlds. Countless alien breeds — some tentacled and squishy, others hulking and googly-eyed — live alongside humans and droids, all of whom wander through frames filled with futuristic curios, distant horizons, or cramped storefronts. Every planet has a personality; a desert vista is so spectacular in its picturesque grandeur that it’s easy to miss the puffs of bright blue and orange clouds floating overhead. The ever-growing space station Alpha encompasses everything from an underwater habitat to its own version of Times Square. Alpha’s creation serves as the film’s prologue, with David Bowie’s “Major Tom” underscoring both the station’s technological advancements and mankind’s cohabitation with myriad alien races from the 1970s to the 2500s (or thereabouts). Here, through a long, delightful montage overflowing with careful evolutionary detail and alien meet-and-greets, Besson makes his intentions clear: the real storytelling is in what you see, not what you hear. After, we presume, the whole of humanity has come together, an alien space ship passes by—and the ceremony plays out again, over and over, new species from all corners of the galaxy adding bits and pieces of their ships and their technologies to the space station hovering Earth’s orbit. In a simple scene and its power resides in that simplicity: the idea of universality, of peaceful coexistence, elegantly symbolized by a shaking of hands and an exchange of knowledge. This is also a film that refuses to let a single action sequence play out simply. Director Luc Besson, has long excelled at set pieces with a twist—think of the backwards car chase in his last feature, Lucy. But for his newest project, he’s painting on a far grander canvas: A tense showdown at an alien bazaar unfolds in two different dimensions that exist in the same space. In a chase scene, the film’s hero has to blast straight through dozens of walls in a space station to have any hope of catching his quarry. A high-dive rescue mission gets complicated by the presence of aliens fishing for humans with giant poles. This is the kind of science-fiction film that doesn’t get made enough anymore. The main cast is mostly pretty effective. I’m still not completely sure how I feel about Dane DeHaan in the titular role, but part of that is that he just doesn’t have the look I’d really think of for the role. Even though his performance is good, he is clearly an actor whose appearance is better suited for odder fare like A Cure for Wellness and Chronicle, & is more or less miscast as a Han Solo-like space lothario. Meanwhile, Cara Delevingne is perfectly cast, standing her ground with just the right amount of sarcasm and spunk. While she’s struggled to make an impression in drama (Paper Towns) or as a baddie (Suicide Squad), Delevingne’s razor-sharp turn makes good use of her stony disposition and terse delivery. Most of the film’s laughs, believe it or not, come from her. The supporting cast is passable, from Clive Owen to Sam Spruell to Kris Wu to Ethan Hawke to Herbie Hancock, with even John Goodman providing a voice for the film there’s some definite name recognition at play. Rihanna rocks up in an utterly thankless role as a shapeshifting squid stripper (Ethan Hawke is her pimp). Mercifully, she’s spared the indignity of being on screen long enough to conclusively validate the notion that she is, in fact, a pop star who can’t act. On the whole, ‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets’ is a messy yet fun film, which despite its blandly conventional plot immerses us into a colorful, vivid, diverse universe that is worth checking out.