STX Films.
It's been a long time since I wrote up a movie review on this website but the last one I saw was something I just had to write about. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is either the best bad movie I have ever seen or the worst good one. It's a film that has some obviously huge problems that ruined the film, but at the same time I was extremely impressed with the technical aspects and production. Plus I could tell that the filmmakers were passionate about the project In this way it reminds me of Avatar, a movie I greatly disliked in terms of story and message but was incredibly well made.
There will be SPOILERS beyond this point.
Let's start with the positive. The special effects in Valerian were excellent. All the various aliens and locations looked very realistic for the most part and even the space battle near the end of the movie was impressive. I never thought that I was looking at CGI even when I knew I was. If the only thing you care about is impressive special effects than Valerian is a must see.
The world building was also a good feature of this film. The opening sequence of mankind's space station growing from a couple of ships meeting in space, to being the meeting place between humans and aliens to finally setting off on their own was probably the best part of the film. And all the various aliens and environments were amazing.
That's about all of the praise I have for Valerian. The rest of the film was a train wreck. The story itself was fairly dumb. One rouge military officer accidentally (or on purpose, the film never made it clear) blew up an alien world and the aliens needed to recover an animal and a pearl so they can rebuild their homeworld. Those aliens are portrayed as absolutely perfect people an their is no ambiguity in the film at all. Had the officer been less of a card carrying villian and the aliens less perfect it would have been an actual story. Since the world was destroyed in combat he very easily could have made the point that he did what he had to do to win the battle and that winning the war was important too, but he didn't. Instead he just seemed to be an asshole for the sake of being an asshole which isn't much of a motivation for a villain.
Casting was a massive problem in this movie and is considered one of the reasons it failed at the box office. The two leads, Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevinge, were not the right people for this role. Both of them seemed way younger in the film than their characters were supposed to be and there was very little in the way of chemistry between them. DeHaan doesn't seem like leading man material. Delevinge was a bit better but wasn't able to carry the film by herself.
The rest of the cast was either wasted or didn't add anything to the story. Both Rutger Hauer and Ethan Hawke were in this movie but it was a case of extended cameos for both of them, which is a total waste of their acting talent. I hadn't even realized that Hauer was in the movie until I was looking at the cast list. Given how talented I think both men are, it was a total waste to have them in roles that could have been portrayed by extras.
Rihanna was in the movie as well and did nothing for me in her role as a shapeshifter. Though many people probably did like her PG rated striptease, I have never found her attractive in any way. I have always seemed to be in the minority there so others will probably disagree with me. Like the fanservice or not though, her character could have easily been cut from the film and would have improved the film considerably. I was also baffled when her character called herself an "illegal immigrant" when it was clear she was a trafficked sex slave. It was just pointlessly political. Her section of the movie slowed the film down to a crawl. Plus it's not like Rihanna's acting was great or anything, though it wasn't horrible I guess.
Plot wise there were a lot of threads that were just left hanging. I don't know if they were expecting a sequel or what but there were so many things that were just left out at the end. For example, the crime boss that serves as the starter antagonist is built up as a huge threat and he vows revenge. We never see him again. We also never find out why the big climatic space battle that destroys the alien planet happens and we never find out if there were any consequences for killing the emperor of another alien species. Part of this was due to the filmmakers trying to make the movie work like it's comic book source where smaller adventures fit in to a larger plot, but it just didn't work well.
Worst of all, the romance plotline between the two leads simply doesn't work. Valerian and Laureline spend the whole film arguing about whether they are going to get married when it's clear that they haven't even had sex and don't appear to be in a relationship at all. Such an old school take on marriage would be a surprise if it wasn't immediately undermined by the fact that Valerian is portrayed as some kind of lady killer (again hurt by the casting). And since both of the actors look so young it seems surreal to see people that look barely older than teenagers talking about getting married. Had the romance plot been that the two had just met and weren't long term partners or that they were older and ready to settle down it wouldn't have brought the film down so much. As it stands right now it is by far the worst part of the movie and I think it would have been improved it they just cut romance out of the film entirely.
The film never really was able to figure out if it should take itself seriously. It's like it kept bouncing around between very silly or funny moments, and darker more dramatic ones. It did the humor at lot better and if they had dropped the darker moments it would have been a better film. It could have been the other way around but I think the market for grimdark sci-fi films is over-saturated and there hasn't been a good campy sci-fi adventure outside of the comic book genera in a long time.
The most frustrating thing though is it was very clear that the filmmakers tried their best to make a good movie and simply failed at doing so. There was a lot of love put into the way this film was made and it's a pity it was dragged down by the issues I pointed out above. Had they had better casting and a less stupid plot it could have been a decent movie and we would probably be watching a sequel by now. Instead it will go down for me like Avatar or Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones as well made movies with a poor overall plot.
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