Nerds That Geek Movie Review: 'Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets'

Written by Mike Cervantes

THIS IS THE EMERGENCY SPOILER ALERT SYSTEM...YOU ARE ADVISED TO READ AT YOUR OWN RISK...

Let me start this review by dragging out a tired old premise: Whyyyy aren’t there more original sci-fi films? It’s a question that seems to be at the forefront of any would-be critic’s mind when they’re moments from watching something that is, in fact, an original sci-fi film. The simple fact of it lies within the abstract concept of sci-fi as a genre; often providing for the viewer a single author’s viewpoint of the future to serve as an allegory for their own ideas towards life and the important things within it. In the realm of large triple-a films, it is often necessary to pad out your film series with more lore and generally more content than mere allegory can provide, which is why franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, and Planet of the Apes still reign supreme.
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Enter Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, a movie that, bless its heart, did attempt to market itself as the most original thing to happen to sci-fi films in recent memory, which is honestly its first big mistake as it really wasn’t intended to be. A more accurate description would be ‘we tossed 200 million at the guy who directed The Fifth Element so he could make a big budget version of The Fifth Element.’ Indeed, said director, Luc Besson, set out to accomplish just that and nothing more, cutting a few predictable corners along the way, such as basing the entire plot of the film on a French graphic novel by Pierre Christin and Jean-Clause Mezieres, rather than waste time on waiting for a screenplay that merely resembled a graphic novel. What results is a film that had a very slim chance of standing out, as it would depict either the long-established tropes of an entire comic book genre, or be outlined point-for-point as an extension of Luc Besson’s already well-admired previous sci-fi film.

Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne are the titular characters, Major Valerian and Sergeant Laureline, characters who mirror both the Tintin-esque French comic book hyper-professional heroes, and the parts played by Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovitch in…you know. Laureline is the hyper intelligent and capable female lead who is frequently trivialized by the Lothario-esque eye of her male counterpart. As the story, and unnecessary b-plot of Valerian’s attempts to get Laureline to marry her, progresses, the duo manage their jobs as planet-hopping special agents. First, they manage a cranially complicated sting operation inside a shopping mall that is inside an alternate dimension. Then they fly to the ‘city of a thousand planets,’ formerly the Earth’s international space station which, after a multitude of upgrades, was shot into deep space and converted into its own colony. There they uncover a plot by the military to cover up an inconvenient truth about the extinction of the planet Alpha.

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This story is, as you would expect, merely an excuse for the special effect auteurs of this spectacle to fill the screen with pure imagination, wall-to-wall aesthetics, and multiple glimpses into alien worlds and cultures; something that, admittedly, isn’t really absent from any filmic sci-fi, Star Wars included. What is jarring about Valerian’s use of these concepts is how little each scene seems to relate to the other. Valerian, the character, gets clued in to the plot of planet Alpha because of a dream, which plays out entirely for the audience at the beginning of the film. We go from that to a holographic sequence where Valerian and Laureline are on a beach, to the aforementioned dimensional mall sequence. Then, later on, we get a pair of unrelated sequences: one where Laureline goes in search of Valerian after he manages to crash-land his space shuttle in a crater, another where Laureline is kidnapped by a set of incongruous alien head-hunters who want to feed her to their leader. Yet somehow, this is all supposed to be a straight line of action, where every sub-section of the plot eventually leads to the uncovering of the hardly-a-mystery that surrounds the destruction of Alpha.

This is ironically not a good film for star-watching, as the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pacing will invariably force you to overlook Herbie Hancock as Valerian and Laureline’s commander, literally only ever seen on holographic monitors, Ethan Hawke as an intergalactic pimp, John Goodman as the voice of a predictably slug-like alien smuggler, and singer Rihanna as a shape-shifting exotic dancer named Bubble. The other three main persons of interest, the military commanders played by Clive Oven, Sam Spruell, and Kris Wu, only exist as possible accomplices in the crime that was the destruction of planet Alpha.

Honestly, the experiment as to whether this would be seen as original sci-fi has already failed, as since Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, has already received mixed-to-low reviews all over the web, and personally, I can’t really find a reason to say it is genuinely that bad. I suppose this film is ultimately a victim of its own marketing: we were expecting a movie of greater scope to come from this, when its only ambition was to be a spiritual successor to The Fifth Element. And honestly, as much as we seem to admire that film, it had many of the same problems, unfocused structure and cringingly amorous main characters included. If you were to see this film in theatres, which is highly unlikely at this point, you wouldn’t have a bad time, but you’d know as soon as I would, that this movie is bound to languish in sci-fi obscurity, next to 99 cent copies of Enemy Mine and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

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