Valerian and
the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)
Director:
Luc Besson
Cast: Dane
DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Rihana
My
expectations were extremely high for Valerian and the City of a Thousand
Planets (2017) because the filmmaker behind the camera was the one and only Luc
Besson, a director who has proven himself time and again to be a visionary with
films like The Fifth Element (1995) and Lucy (2014). And he’s also proven
himself in non genre films like Leon: The Professional (1994) and The Big Blue (1988). Besson’s always been a prolific
director who jumps effortlessly from genre to genre with success. But I was
extremely excited with Valerian because it marked his return to big budget,
larger than life, escapist science fiction that we saw him play with in The
Fifth Element, a film I was blown away by when I first saw it. I literally saw
it five times in theaters! And if the trailer for Valerian was to be an indication of what we could expect, Besson was poised to wow us again. Does Besson still have the ability to amaze us?
Valerian is
all about these special government agents, Valerian and Laureline, who are
assigned to retrieve a creature, the last of its kind, who can reproduce a
pearl that can offer limited amounts of energy to the universe. But of course,
dark, evil forces (read: the government) are after it and so, the race is on to
protect this little creature from certain death. At the same time, Valerian is
trying to prove his love to Laureline, will he ever learn to love anything but
himself?
This film
has lots of pros, but unfortunately lots of cons as well. But lets start with
the good shall we? The good is that the film is a visual tour de force, a
barrage of ideas that never stop coming. Right from the opening sequences of
the movie, where we see how the titular city of a thousand planets is formed,
we are wowed with race after race of alien beings, who start forming a part of
the gigantic floating city in space. I get what Besson was going for with this
movie. He wanted to do something that was so filled with imagination and
creativity that there is no way it could be ignored. He wanted to give us an
overdose of awesomeness and for all intents and purposes he succeeded.
Imagination never stops with this one; you’ll be saying “cool” every five seconds.
Now considering the amount of imagination and design involved in this movie, it
should have been a huge hit in theaters. So what happened? Why did it flop so
spectacularly?
The flopping
came as a result of some of the films negative attributes. For starters the
films plot is paper thin. There is no plot here save for running from one place
to the next, trying to save a cute little creature. Sadly, without much more than
that in terms of story, the film turns into a beautiful looking, empty
spectacle. Pretty to look at, but with no substance, Valerian turns into the classic
case of style over substance. Then there’s the fact that American audiences like
a little familiarity with their genre fare and you’ve got yourselves the
ingredients for a perfect bomb at the box office. If a film doesn’t come from
some pre-existing universe that audiences were just dying to see come to life,
then they won’t care or connect, even if the film is good. Valerian and
Laureline comes from a French comic book from the sixties that American audiences
never read or heard of until now. For Besson it’s a lifelong dream come true to
bring his childhood comic book heroes to life, but for American audiences Valerian
and Laureline is something they are not familiar with at all, filing it under
the “too weird” file.
Then there’s
this male chauvinist thing about it. Valerian treats women like sex objects,
and for most of the film he treats Laureline like crap, even though he’s
supposed to have affection for her. He’s always being the quintessential “guy”
telling her to “wait here” while he takes care of everything, which today is
considered “passé” by savvy movie audiences. In todays modern films, women have
grown past the damsel in distress cliché, but apparently, nobody gave Besson
the memo. Even the title of the film is chauvinist when you think about it. The
comic was called Valerian and Laureline, not just Valerian. Why kick the female
out of the film’s title? Is she not integral to the film? Are they not a duo? I
roll my eyes at that type of thing. Then there’s the thing about the two protagonists
having zero chemistry together. They do not look like they are attracted or in
love with each other at all! It’s like we’re supposed to believe Valerian is
passionately in love with Laureline, but there’s nothing there to prove it to
us. It seems to me that if LOVE is the theme that is going to hold this film
together, and it is supposed to be, well then Besson should have made sure it
was passionate and heartfelt. He should have made sure their love for each
other shined through and quite honestly, it doesn’t. Valerian comes through as
a selfish cold guy who cares only for himself. I mean, I get it, he’s supposed
to be selfish and cold in order to learn the ways of love, but come on. At
least a glimpse of their love for each other would have been nice.
But I don’t
think Besson ever meant for it to be “deep” or profound, it was simply meant to
be a spectacle, eye candy in its purest form. So maybe if you go in with that
mentality you won’t be disappointed. There’s a couple of inside jokes in there
as well for lovers of The Fifth Element, actually, the film has many
similarities with The Fifth Element, certain scenes in Valerian felt copy
pasted from The Fifth Element, but fear not. Valerian has so many new ideas,
you won’t mind. Final say is that this is an amazing film visually,
conceptually and design wise, but is totally void of the love and emotions that
it professes to be about, so that in my opinion is its biggest fault and in my
opinion the reason why it tanked at the box office. And that’s weird because
Besson’s theme, in a lot of his films has always been love, and human emotion,
so in that sense I was surprised that the film was lacking in that area. Yet,
in the films defense I will say that it didn’t deserve to fail as big as it did
because there is space out there for escapist films whose sole purpose is to
entertain us, and in that respect, Valerian did not fail at all.
Rating: 3 1/2 out of 5
