What Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets could have been
A script unable to compete with the visual impact. That is probably the headline that best sums up Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Luc Besson’s latest work (Leon: The Professional and Lucy) based on the space comic Valerian and Laureline, by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières.
It is difficult to criticize the film after the elegant initial sequence with the sound of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, where we see a long succession of handshakes between different nations and then species. A perfect introduction to the genesis of Alpha, the epicenter of the story that will be narrated below.
However, it is even more complicated to speak ill ofher with the brilliant display digital scenarios that it shows. Besson goes one step beyond the “techotropolis” he created for The Fifth Element (1997). In Valerian we see a black market that coexists in multiple dimensions and creatures made of pearls and with huge long legs that, inevitable, remind of the bluish humanoid from Avatar (2009) by James Cameron.
The location of each and every one of the elements of each scenario has been chosen with extreme care, giving rise to an explosive set that invites you to get lost in it.
But not even the best vfx can cover the clumsiness of its narrative. In addition to saving the Alpha, we see Dane Dehaan and Cara Delevigne as Valerian and Laureline juggle an unjustified romantic subplot of “tug of war”. Not to mention that two life forms of totally different dimensions would have more chemestry than them. Constant flirty comments that don’t work.
And if to all of that we add a villian with almost no presence and the absence of another underlying plot, we find a movie that could hace been a good science-fiction mocie, but it remains as a poor entertainment product.
