Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
My Grade: C+
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This movie is a tough one.... There's a lot to like and there's a lot to dislike. There's Luc Besson who gave us the imaginative world of The Fifth Element but then also the oddness and strange editing choices of Lucy.
Valerian starts of with an interesting, cool, montage of events occurring in Earth orbit with the docking meeting of Apollo 18 and the Russian space station Salyut and the two astronauts meeting at the docking hatch for the first time and shaking hands. A union of scientists and early space explorers both coming from governments in high opposition of one another. We jump forward to a few years in the future as the montage continues, showing more space-craft docking to, presumably, the ISS and hands been shaken with each additional government joining the space station, we jump forward a few decades or so and a module docks that generates artificial gravity, we go forward a century or so and we see an alien craft docking, and then we go into a series of scenes of various aliens docking with the space station, walking aboard, and shaking hands with the humans greeting them in the entry foyer. The space station grows and grows to a massive jumble of ships in Earth's orbit and we're told that the size of the space-station is starting to cause problems with Earth's orbit from it's own gravity it's starting to generate so it's given some thrusters, pushed out of orbit, and off into deep space to go out and continue to grow on its own.
It's really a remarkable, very well done, beautiful scene done to David Bowie's "Space Oddity" (Major Tom.)
We flash forward another few centuries where the station is in deep space, humans are big explorers in space with FTL travel and.... The "story" starts.
Well, first we're treated to a long scene of aliens and some ritual involving magical pearls on their home planet before it's soon destroyed by space debris for unknown reasons or causes that's explored in the rest of the movie.... Eventually.
We're next introduced to two "special forces" agents set out on a mission to recover an alien artifact in another dimension.
Overall on the surface the story in of it's self isn't "terrible" but the biggest problem is that the main cast isn't interesting or charismatic enough to pull it off. Comparing this to The Fifth Element, the TFE only works because of Bruce Willis, Mila Jolovich and Gary Oldman. Good actors who really brought their characters to life and, in Oldman's case, chewed scenery. Almost any other actors and the movie wouldn't have worked and had been forgotten.
That's the problem here the actors are boring. The main guy (DeHaan) is suppsoed to be this bad-ass universe's best super secret agent, and big time womanizer. He looks like he's the guy who picked on you in High School and ended up with a career working in the lumber section at Home Depot. I do not buy him as this galactic super-agent. He doesn't have that level of screen presence or charisma. Had this been a Channing Tatum, Ryan Reynolds or someone like that it would've worked a lot more. But this guy, you kind of want to punch him more in his expressionless, yet somehow still smirking, face more than you want to root for him,
The main actress (Previously most seen as the Air Dancer/Enchantress in Suicide Screen) does okay. She's a little flat but she's a little more interesting and fits into her character's trope better than DeHaan does.
Another problem I had with the movie is.... You don't know what's happening, or why, through pretty much all of it. There's MacGuffins that characters or after and you only sort-of know why, there's stock "Evil Generals" there but you don't know what their aim/goal is and things like that. The movie finally explains all of this stuff to you at the start of the last act. (Sort of late to fill your audience in on what's going on.)
The movie also gets side-tracked during all of this, seemingly wanting to have you experience the complexities of this universe but it feels more like getting dragged into pointless side-quests or time-filler quests in a video game. The Enchantress girl needs to find out what's going on so she has to go off on this mini-quest to get an alien jellyfish that can help her learn this and has to enlist the help of some NPCs.
DeHaan has to save Enchantress but she's in a place he can't go so he has to go off on a side-quest to acquire a shape-shifting alien that can help him so we spend several minutes with him doing this and watch a striptease/dance in a brothel.
(Which gives us one of only a couple interesting characters, Rhiana as the shapeshifting alien "Bubble." A character I buy the connection between her DeHaan with more than the connection he has with his own supposed fiancee.)
As visually interesting these side-quests and such are, and as interesting as it is to explore this universe, dammit, these actors can't quite make everything else interesting to watch between these "set pieces."
The movie does start of great an interesting through showing us the development of this space station through the centuries and an extended, dialogless scene on an alien planet. Great world-building here. Then the main-characters come in and the movie starts to drag a bit.
Then a set piece on NotTatooine! Going between this barren planet an an alien market in another dimension!
Then character nonsense.
Then an action scene with aliens capturing a commander and chasing them down!
Then character nonsense.
There's some good universe-building here but just not much with the characters, I was more invested in the alien characters we get in the opening sequence and shape-changing stripper than I was our leads. The splendor of the movie is worth seeing, just don't expect to be that interested in what's going on between the set-pieces.
