Luc Besson’s new film is, to say the least, caught in a quandary. It would probably fare better if you didn’t know what to make of it than if you did. I narrowly squeeze into the latter bucket of opinions, but I will resist hyperbole for longer than the most vocal of its representatives. CNN.com recently reported that Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets “makes an early bid for worst movie of the year.” As a just writer, I mention that — while I will not rush to defend the movie in question — this claim dismisses, to some degree, the bulk of a dark year that has brought us King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, The Great Wall, The Mummy, and not one but two dreary episodes from fatigued franchises (Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean) which have burnt through to their fifth installment. In other words, I wish it didn’t get much worse than “Valerian,” but it does. Just saying.
This one’s based off of the French science-fiction comic-book series Valerian and Laureline, initialized in the late 1960s’ and long before its time (its illustrations are considered important predecessors to their creative offspring, including Star Wars and Blade Runner). Curiously enough, it hasn’t been given a major screen adaptation until now. This comes late. I know people who have waited for it, too few to keep the film afloat in the North American box office — sometimes audiences aren’t fair, but you can’t blame them for being impatient. Four of my most avidly hopeful friends, all of whom were charmed by the prospect of this adaptation, could muster only a vague familiarity with the source material. Together, we were five of the seven crowd members at the AMC’s showing. It was a pitiful attendance from those who had mostly attended out of pity.
The movie won’t be bad enough to lose its handful of faithfuls, which I am not one of. Still, it’s branded by its absentees; it kinda sucks, and it needn’t evoke Star Wars to pale in comparison to much of even basic modern sci-fi (although Valerian’s ship does do an awfully good impression of the Millennium Falcon). “Valerian” draws more similarities with Avatar, in that it creates a diverse alien ecosystem that is busy enough to appear lifelike yet powdered with enough colors to look aesthetically pleasing in passing. In the case of Besson’s picture, we aren’t winding along a nature tour as much as skimming through its brochure; the film is textually centered around its creatures, but it’s too timid to explore their culture for more than visual finesse or cartoonish malaise.
Instead, we follow around the less interesting and less interested intergalactic sheriffs of the comic-book title. They are humans, who are unfortunately portrayed as the film’s most spiritually stagnant species. Their names bear the full responsibility of vying for the characters’ value; “Valerian and Laureline” at least sounds like it pops. Respectively, Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne (both miscast) turn in remarkably underwhelming performances, interpreting their crusaders as if they are too lazy to be sprightly and too stubborn to play it cool.
Though “Valerian” is categorized as an “indie” film, its $180 million budget nudges it well within the range of Marvel-sized digital proportions. I’ve all but given up on identifying the problem to be solved in action flicks like these; a script, I will decide, is successful if it convinces me to celebrate with the hero once they win. Here, Besson’s serves neither its characters nor its audience. It fails in its plot, like many superhero movies do nowadays, but it lacks a reserve of affection to fall back onto. Consider this exchange as Valerian prepares to mount his ship aboard the space station Alpha, receiving the defense minister’s messages over the intercom:
DEFENSE MINISTER: Major, you’re twenty minutes behind schedule.
VALERIAN: Well… time flies when you’re having fun.
What are lines like this doing, existing in 2017? This bit would be unoriginal thirty years ago — it teeters now on meaninglessness. This is surely not meant to be dissected, but I do so out of spite. “Twenty minutes behind schedule.” Schedule? What a boring word. How much of our protagonists’ escapades have been planned up to this point? If we can’t trust anything we’re seeing to be spontaneous enough to allow a discrepancy of twenty minutes, then are we actually witnessing danger, and therefore excitement?
If any has existed here, then Valerian has buried it under a uselessly dry response of sarcasm. Boy, isn’t he a catch? He and Laureline are assigned to protect the commander (Clive Owen) from a supposedly radical group of intellectual life forms resembling the Na’vi of Avatar. Their motives against the humans — which are never, by the way, stated to be violent, as they are established early on as a peaceful tribe — are roughly contextualized by an opening scene in which they are victimized in an uncomfortably agonizing manner. I, along with my friends, almost immediately sided with the aliens and agreed that the commander was instilling irrational fear of the innocent. And yet, through a short quote that clumsily weaves in his character description from the comics, I picked up that Valerian proclaims himself to be a servant to his superiors, which prevents him from investigating the intentions behind his instructions. This, of course, is to forbid him from discovering the inevitable plot twist sooner. It’s a bad sign when he’s the most likable when he’s the most incompetent. I’d prefer a square over a jerk.
The effects are in fact dazzling, at times disorienting. I enjoyed sinking into the film’s brief flares of inspiration found in its scenery (a thriving market located in a parallel dimension, a cloud of air peppered with neon butterflies), if only to succumb to the locational abyss. The film’s map is a labyrinth, and it is so spatially confused that many times I could not answer where I was.
The film’s epic flaw is its heroes. For one, Laureline’s name is oddly dropped from the credits, even though there’s not much of a discernible difference from her counterpart, other than the fact that he is a man. For what it’s worth, it should be called Laureline and the City of a Thousand Planets; Valerian’s personality feels like it was scraped off the floor of an outhouse. At least Delevingne steers Laureline away from complete emotional death with a handful of grins. I mean, wait until you get a load of him! He’s a clear derivative of Han Solo, with one grave variation: if you took away his ego, his over-dependence on control, and his self-obsession, then Valerian would still be a creep. He keeps a virtual scrapbook for fondly reminiscing about the women he’s slept with, which is supposed to be… funny?
DeHaan was the wrong choice for the role; he is a typecast for his crumpled figure, but his reservations don’t possess a boyish sneakiness as much as they do a mature, broken disconnect (like in Chronicle, which I liked, and The Place Beyond the Pines, which I loved). Yes, he may as well be unconscious in “Valerian,” but what was he expected to do? He’s not Harrison Ford, and he’s not inclined to be.
It’s Besson who wrote DeHaan and Delevingne into a hole. Laureline and Valerian share no essential chemistry, other than when he periodically and casually prods her to be his wife. What is this? Does he treat marriage as the same arbitrary challenge that he treats driving a spaceship? I wonder for how long the two would be a couple before the divorce papers were drawn up. Forgive me for being blunt; I can hardly see Valerian growing up, least of all with her.
I will not, nor cannot, spoil the ending, for I do not understand it. It’s missing something quite important, but I don’t know what it is, whether it be a shot or a scene. If Besson needed to cut the fat for his film, he could’ve easily taken out the nearly thirty minute detour in its midsection, used for DeHaan to stumble into an adult entertainment club and witness a truly odd cameo from Rihanna. (Look closely at the pimp. Is… is that… Ethan Hawke? Dressed like a dirty carnival operator, the sort that scares kids away from the ferris wheel? Is this what he gets himself into when Richard Linklater isn’t using him for better movies?)
I’m getting myself more worked up the longer I write, so I’ll conclude while I still feel like giving only a two-star rating. I recently caught up with Jordan Peele’s impressive directorial debut Get Out, which you should see instead of this movie. Its budget — built on an original script — didn’t even hit $5 million in the production process; the film would eventually rake in over $250 million worldwide since its February release. If I did my math right, “Valerian” was about 36 times as expensive to make, but it’s barely made one fifth the money that Get Out has. My theory? Peele’s producers made sure to put every penny in the story. Creative destruction indeed.
