by Dancin' Dan
Luc Besson's comic adaptation Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a mess. But so was his magnum opus The Fifth Element, and that Bruce Willis-starrer went on to become something of a modern-day sci-fi classic. Only time will tell if Valerian will go on to a similarly charmed afterlife, but for my money it suffers under the weight of expectations...
Take the titular city for starters. It's called Alpha, and is essentially the International Space Station writ large. Thousands of different species live and work there, sharing resources and knowledge specific to their home planets. Looking at the picture above, you'd be forgiven for thinking it came from a sequel to The Fifth Element, bearing the heavy influence of the earlier film's future Manhattan:
Alpha is a fantastic setting for a space opera, and all the time Valerian spends with the different alien species there is time well-spent. But unfortunately that time isn't nearly enough - we mostly only get quick glimpses of the myriad inhabitants, which is a pity for all the production designers, visual effects artists, and makeup artists who had a hand in creating them. Like its predecessor, Valerian is a feast for the eyes, with so much detail packed into every corner of its beautifully rendered world. But the film isn't really interested in most of these fantastic beasts, as it has a plot with human characters to attend to.
And it's here that Valerian runs into its biggest problem. It's not just that Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne look like they're blood relations when they're supposed to be lovers, although that is a huge problem. It's more that neither of them have any clue how they're supposed to be acting. Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich, limited actors though they may be, intuitively knew exactly which parts of The Fifth Element could be read at face value and which needed a comic spin. DeHaan and Delevingne, whether through a lack of direction from Besson or through their own limitations, have no such intuition, and the result is a film that, for all its visual energy, feels flat for most of its running time. Say what you will about The Fifth Element, but "flat" is one descriptor no one could ever apply to it.
It's a shame, really, because Valerian starts out really well. The opening prologue takes place on a beautiful beach planet and completely immerses you in an alien culture with almost no understandable dialogue. And then there's a chase scene in an interdimensional alien bazaar that is one of the most original things I've ever seen onscreen. It gives you the giddy, can't-believe-your-eyes high at which Besson excels. But that's pretty much the only time you'll get that high in the whole film. To be sure, there are pleasures to be had here, but this film doesn't have the courage to go to the truly crazy, out-there places The Fifth Element went to way back in 1997. Or rather, it goes to pretty much the same places, but twenty years later they don't seem quite so crazy.