I am by no means deaf to the charms of “leave your brain at the door” cinema. But I happen to live in a time wherein the term “blockbuster” promises a hell of a lot more than what it used to. Thanks in large part to the advent of Spielberg impersonators, a shift from Stanislavski’s method to naturalism in our actors, and the premium placed on special effects in the last few years, our worst movies stack up pretty nicely against disasters like Superman IV or Battlefield Earth. For better or worse, the “art” of movie making has become a “procedure,” and Hollywood seems to have it figured out.
A bad movie in 2017, more times than not, ends up being a movie that has trouble masking the gears at work. Baywatch delivered all the ingredients for a good time, except a cynical execution prevented those ingredients from congealing in a way that makes you forget these things get made by a boardroom full of dads. Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets isn’t one of those movies. It’s ambitious and earnest, yet manages to suck for reasons uniquely its own.
Besson is often lauded as being one of the few remaining filmmakers capable of a distinct visual style. Valerian is no exception I suppose, but that sort of thing can no longer be the driving force for movies this size. The legendary director makes an active choice to gloss over any semblance of humanism in favor of proselytizing his pretty toys: alien species, funky space crafts, cosmic philosophizing, and dramatic establishing shots. Strangely, it all feels unimpressive. For a world so impassioned by attention to detail, its many worlds feel distractedly uninhabited.
Good intentions aside, Valerian and The City of a Thousand Planets is representative of a mistake too many “visionaries” make. The industry has already cleared through the brush and the barbs of CGI wonderment. If this era of filmmaking knows anything, it's how to make movies LOOK good. It’s not a feat anymore. Valerian's palate is rich with alien designs married with contemporary space hits, but so is Guardians of The Galaxy. And that movie has heart and characters to boot. Valerian doesn’t feel like a movie, it feels like a challenge put to the special effects department.
After the opening dialogue cemented my greatest fears about the kind of weightless movie I had just paid $17.50 for, I made peace with enjoying what I hoped would be a visually realized exercise in escapism. I found myself largely underwhelmed by even that aspect of the movie. The many aliens and planets strewn across it’s over 2 hour running time often seemed either impractical or problematic. It’s imagination ranged from antiquated indigenous stand-ins to "Remember Star Wars?!" The costume designs, bar a super suit that endowed its wearer to effortlessly burst through structures, fell into category two with a dash of Abrams' Star Trek for good measure.
All of this would be forgivable if Besson cared to give any direction to his actors, particularly his lead. Dane Dehaan is a fine actor, not a conventional leading man, and certainly not the kind that sells lines like “I’d die for you” without prompting spurious laughter from an audience (that happened in the theatre I was in, anyway).
Valerian is written as an archetypical badass. He’s the kind of old-school brute that requires a certain degree of charisma or comedic prowess to pull off. Dehaan bears a tormented innocence that is anachronistic to the throwback protagonist Besson is clearly going for here.
Thankfully Laureline, the film’s other lead played by Cara Delevingne, is more at home, as fashion model seems to translate to charming movie star pretty seamlessly. Rihanna is as magnetic as ever and helms one of the standouts scenes in the film, while the rest of the cast are glaringly aware they’re starring in “Sci-Fi” the movie. You get Clive Owen playing the perfunctory power hungry space general, John Goodman as the sneering Jabba the Hutt-esque McGuffin chaser, and Ethan Hawke as… to be honest, I have no idea what the fuck Ethan Hawke was doing. He just might top my list of awkwardly misguided cameos of recent memory.
The plot suffers from many of the same symptoms. It’s a dense framework to hang a vacuous adventure on, except the narrative is too thin. It attempts depth by way of a cursory message about the impact of colonialism, tempers the scope of its world with a “will they won’t they” love story it can’t make us give a shit about and changes set pieces about as often as it forgets to remind us exactly what anybody’s motivation is. Ultimately it’s a chase movie without any sense of direction.
Valerian and The CIty of A Thousand Planets is an odd misstep because it tries so hard not to be one. It isn’t tongue and cheek like Triple X, or unabashedly stupid like Transformers. It’s a genuine attempt at doing justice to the French comic books that kick started this whole genre in the first place. Unfortunately, the influence of the source material isn’t quite enough to repudiate the fact that the best elements of Valerian and The City of a Thousand Planets have been done on the big screen before and a whole lot better. If you're going to see it at all, I guess you gotta see it in the theatre but I’d wager you’d be better off saving your cash until Skywalker and company do what they do best later on this year.
