BurtonReviews Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets: With a Thousand Yawns

(Image sourced from http://screenrant.com/valerian-city-of-a-thousand-planets-release-date-china/)

Luc Besson, a legendary director in the industry with such achievements as being the first filmmaker to showcase the talent of a young Natalie Portman in ‘Leon’, creating a strange but engrossing sci-fi world in ‘The Fifth Element’, and making Scarlett Johansson talk about breast milk in a serious manner in ‘Lucy’. Okay, maybe that last one isn’t really an achievement, or something any of us want to remember, but with a 2 out of 3 rate of success, Besson is still a director with a glowingly positive track record. Now, with his latest film being released, ‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets’, going back to his ‘Fifth Element’ strange and wacky sci-fi style, will his filmography stay as a glowing success or will his projects become a flip of a coin whether they turn out good, or god awful?

(Video sourced from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8oVfkZM3pA)

The story of ‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets’ follows the titular Valerian (Dane DeHaan, ‘Chronicle’) and his partner Laureline (Cara Delevigne, ‘Paper Towns’). Partner in both sense of the word, both romantically, and as government agents on Alpha, a huge space station that is bustling with almost every species in the universe, a City of a Thousand Planets, get it. But when a meeting of the government heads is attacked by an unknown species of alien, the peaceful cohabitation of all these vastly different species is threatened, and it is up to Valerian and Laureline to find out who is behind this attack and stop an dastardly plot they are cooking up.

Right, I’m going to start this review off with the good aspects of this movie, no matter how few there are. Firstly, you already knew this from even just a screenshot of the movie, but Alpha and its myriad of unique and appropriately alien landscapes and complex cities look incredible, as do the incredibly well thought out species of aliens that inhabit them. The CGI, coupled with the art design, used to bring this unbelievably ambitious concept to life is awe inspiring and really does bring this wacky futuristic what-if to life in spectacularly bright and vivid fashion.

Speaking of the alien races and the world of Alpha, the mythology behind each species, how they look, operate, communicate and live their day to day lives is incredibly fleshed out and well constructed, and so is the universe they occupy. From a stylish and brief summary of this mega-space station’s history that opens the film, you are sucked into Valerian’s world and instantly admire and believe this unique and novel sci-fi concept. And what helps keep you in this universe is how each alien species shown on screen, from those moving the plot forward, to just some that are passing by in the background of a crowded shot in a trans-dimensional market, don’t ask but it’s pretty damn cool, feels like a relatively believable and fleshed out member of this huge inter-species station. This level of detail to create such a dense and intricate never-before-seen world is something not to be scoffed at and was a place I wanted to explore more.   

(Image sourced from http://www.iamag.co/features/valerian-and-the-city-of-a-thousand-planets-official-trailer/)

But past the movie’s initial shock and awe of having such a deep and jaw droppingly gorgeous sci-fi world, the quality of ‘Valerian’ begins to crack and buckle from its many flaws and shortcomings.

The most apparent and cringe-worthy one being apparent very early on, and that is this films painfully awkward dialogue. Character interactions range from unbelievably cheesy – “love breaks all the rules” – to uncomfortably clunky and expositional -  “I know you’re quite the lady killer” – to a point where characters cease to be characters, and just become exposition machines that have had some cliché character traits slapped onto them for good measure.

Now a good enough actor would be able to rise above these script problems and through sheer grit and determination make even the cringiest of lines a compelling moment, and don’t get me wrong Dane DeHann is an exceptional actor when in the right part, but I feel that DeHann was painfully miscast as the too cool for school “lady killer” Valerian. Sure, any actor can escape the type casting that can be forced upon them, and ever since ‘Chronicle’, DeHann has been the emotionally damaged ball of angst you just want to help have a happy future, and my view of him has not changed in the slightest after seeing his turn as Valerian. Just physically, his thinner, teen like physique didn’t really fit a hardened agent of the government who has been in the service for five years. Couple that with DeHann simply putting on a grimaced cool-guy voice that sapped all the charisma out of his cheesy post-battle quips, then you have someone on screen that is trying to be the cool badass action hero protagonist instead of simply just being the character there right before you, like we have gotten with Chris Pratt as Star Lord or another Chris, but this time Pratt, as Captain Kirk in the newly rebooted Star Trek series of movies.

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And while his partner and co-star Cara Delevigne as the capable and strong willed Laureline did a fine job portraying the no fuss attitude of a badass agent who gets what she wants, when she wants, there was one thing that really lacked at what was supposed to be the most emotionally investing moments of the movie. And that was the chemistry that was supposed to be between the two characters. The script reads, while admittedly very clunky, as if these two characters are irresistibly pulled to each other through their violently sparking passion that can never be tamed. However, how it played on screen was dull and dry as sand. The “loving” scenes between the two once again felt more like two people being paid to say lines instead of just two characters who have uncontainable love for each other, and made those “emotional” moments fall flat on their cheesy faces.

While the universe of this ambitious concept felt well thought out and somewhat feasible, the actual plot of ‘Valerian’ is gosh-darn nonsense, and nothing like what was advertised in the trailer. To me, from the trailers, I thought that some mysterious and scary force was going from planet to planet on the Alpha station and wiping it out. Turns out, nothing nearly as cool as that is happening, instead a planet that died thirty years ago has had its history erased from records and now we’re finding out why. Sounds way less cool right? Well that’s because it is, and onto of that how the mystery unfolds makes very little sense, to a point where in the final moments of the movie I didn’t know how the main characters were going to succeed, or what they actually were wanting to succeed at doing.

But by this time I had given into the torture, because hot damn is this movie way too long. Clocking in at 2 hours and 17 minutes ‘Valerian’ just kept going on and on and on, and the most insulting part of this whole experience was that I left sequences of the movie already seeing that it could have been completely cut out of the movie, and nothing else would have been effected. Why did we just go on this huge detour where we had to crash a emperors feast, why can’t the two main characters stop getting captured, why am I watching this? So many questions, so much time to think over them.

(Image sourced from https://www.traileraddict.com/valerian-and-the-city-of-a-thousand-planets/trailer)

And when you don’t care about anybody involved in these sequences of events, a movie can really start to drag on. Characters would enter and leave the screen, and the score would be telling me to shed a tear or be emotionally moved by this heart warming interaction, but I just didn’t care, nothing in the movie, from the story, to the dialogue, to the flat acting was compelling me too, or engrossing me into the moment, so I was just left there looking at the visuals of the ‘Valerian’ thinking: “yep, it does still look cool.”

So yeah, not another homerun by Besson, but instead another turd on my lawn, mixing my metaphors abit here, but you get my point. The characters were miscast, the dialogue was painfully cheesy, even to those of us in the audience without lactose intolerance, and the plot was nonsensical to a point where I was left just saying: “yeah, sure, please just end.”

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets = 4 /10

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