Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
Good neighbourhood, meh protagonist
+: visuals brilliant, setting and worldbuilding reflect decades of the original comics
-: general flatness and lack of nonvisual vibrancy
Another year, another huge-budget ($177m) space opera arrives and commercially faceplants. It’s sad, because in this case, we’ve got a premise less alienating than Jupiter Ascending (2015) and, more annoying, the same themes as Avatar (2009) done with a far better story — if not one approaching greatness.
Part of Valerian’s difficulty is that it opens, John Carter (2012) style, with multiple opening scenes, none of which are readily cut-able. The first details Alpha, the eponymous city (curiously, pretty much never referred to as the ‘City of a Thousand Planets’ in the actual film). It’s a great sequence, if predictably soundtracked (“Space Oddity”, of course), panning over centuries and proving a great piece of storytelling in its own right. The second sequence sets up the conflict, although its opening seems to detail irrelevancies for a long time — both within the scene and across the film. And then, and only then, do we finally reach the actual title character and his partner.
The setup of this film means Dane DeHaan sharing screentime mostly with Cara Delevingne, who out-acts him pretty consistently. The romance subplot, mostly unmoored from the wider plot until the very end, proves unconvincing, not least because, as Laureline suspects, he comes across exactly like he wants her to be another conquest, and never really breaks out of this throughout the film. In general, there’s a flatness to the title character, never coming across as truly witty, likeable or even roguishly antiheroic. Some of this carries across to the film overall; its action scenes have a lazy editing to them, a steady medium-shot consistency much of the time, relying on changing environments to provide much of the dynamic.
In fairness, there’s no faulting said environments. Although some of the film gets expository, for the most part it’s willing to throw out everything and anything to impress, in an age when impressing audiences with CGI is an impossible ask. Entire landscapes get conjured up for the purposes of a couple of brief scenes, taking in oceans, caves, skies and beaches. A vast, Star Wars style space battle exists for one flashback. A couple of times, we’re told the aptly-named Big Market has a million stores, and it’s believable. Said sequence is also the most compelling one, a Mission: Impossible operation which involves travelling through two extra dimensions. It’s smart, it’s funnier than many of the more laboured quips and gags elsewhere, and it’s probably the highlight of the film.
Unfortunately, most of the time the effects can’t quite rocket-boost an average story. As mentioned above, it’s thematically Avatar — the abuses of colonialism rectified in part by a member of the colonists — although it’s handled better than said film. Valerian, at least, isn’t presented as better than the victims, or somehow super-virtuous. Doubtless there are criticisms others could make but, as also above: film’s already sunk, no sequel coming.
Which is a shame, but not a tragedy. Hollywood’s pretty much locked into franchises as of the mid-2010s, and the natural rate of attrition kills off the good ones all the time. Now, given how even the shittier series (Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers) are at best floundering and at worst dying, something new has to come through. That won’t be Valerian, for better or worse — or, to be precise, a little of both.
