The new trailer for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is such a cacophony of colors, light and sound that it’s nearly impossible to tell if there are human people in there somewhere.
There are rainbow rock spires, steampunk doors covered in cogs, an armored alien schoolbus, Woola repurposed from John Carter with porcupine spines this time, spaceships, space vessels, spacecraft, space itself, space stations, space rocks, space traffic, space planets, space boats, robots, aliens, alien robots, star-shaped irises, ambient-lit bubbles, peacock people, shoulder dragons, giant mollusc shells, explosions, popular British muppet Clive Owen, worm whales and kicking.
Try and find a human in this:
There are some human shapes in there that look like Cara Delevingne and Dane DeHaan, but they're both so waifish and vaguely blond that they fade into the cracks between colors. IMDb says Rutger Hauer, John Goodman, Rihanna and Ethan Hawke are in there somewhere too, but we’ll believe it when we see it.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets looks like several other over-stimulated and under-humanized genre movies like Jupiter Ascending, The Last Witch Hunter, Elysium and John Carter. And speaking of John Carter, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets looks to be duplicating one of that film’s disastrous marketing decisions: playing up legacy. Like John Carter, Valerian is claiming to be based upon something that influenced everything that came later, in this case a French comic called Valérian and Laureline (why the hell does only Valerian make the title?). This is a bizarre argument, as if anyone would see a movie because of its source material’s decades-old importance.
Still, no matter how bad it is, I’ll probably wind up buying it on Blu-ray, just like Jupiter Ascending.
