Valerian.and.the.city.of.a.thousand.planets.201... Page

Valerian is not a bad movie to hate; it is a frustrating movie because it comes so close to greatness. Every frame is filled with the love Besson has for the source material. The world of Alpha feels lived-in, dangerous, and magical. But a city of a thousand planets is a setting, not a story. Without a hero to root for or a plot that surprises, the film remains a gorgeous, expensive corpse. It is a testament to the idea that in cinema, the heart must always be more important than the hologram. For all its thousands of planets, the film forgets to populate them with a single soul.

This character failure is compounded by a plot that is distractingly derivative. The central conflict involves the genocide of a peaceful, ethereal race (the Pearls) by a greedy human commander, forcing Valerian to choose between military orders and morality. While earnest, this is a recycled trope from Avatar , Dances with Wolves , and countless other colonial guilt narratives. The film tries to juggle this heavy subject matter with goofy comedic interludes (Rihanna’s memorable but pointless shape-shifting burlesque routine) and bureaucratic satire. The tonal whiplash is severe. One moment, the film is meditating on ecological destruction; the next, it features a comedy relief character who can only say his own name like a sci-fi Pikachu. Besson, the director of the tightly-plotted The Fifth Element , seems to have forgotten how to balance tone. Valerian.and.The.City.of.A.Thousand.Planets.201...

However, the moment the film asks the audience to listen and care, it collapses. The central problem is the casting and characterization of the titular hero, Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan). Designed as a swaggering, cocky space cowboy in the vein of Han Solo, DeHaan instead delivers a performance that is unintentionally petulant and uncharismatic. His Valerian is less a daring agent and more a spoiled teenager who has read a book about seduction. The narrative repeatedly halts for him to aggressively proposition his partner, Laureline (Cara Delevingne), who, in a saner script, would have filed a sexual harassment complaint with the galactic federation. The chemistry between the leads is non-existent; Delevingne’s Laureline appears perpetually exhausted by her partner’s advances, which makes the film’s insistence that they are a romantic duo feel deeply uncomfortable rather than endearing. Valerian is not a bad movie to hate;

In 2017, French director Luc Besson released Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets , a film that represented a lifelong dream. Based on the seminal French comic series Valérian and Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières—a series that directly inspired Star Wars —Besson poured over $200 million of his own fortune into creating a visually unhinged, original sci-fi universe. The result is one of modern cinema’s most fascinating paradoxes: a film of breathtaking imaginative scope that is simultaneously hollow at its core. Valerian succeeds as a museum of futuristic art but fails as a compelling narrative, offering a crucial lesson about the difference between world-building and storytelling. But a city of a thousand planets is a setting, not a story