Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)
Directed by Luc Besson
In the 28th century, Valerian and Laureline are special operatives charged with keeping order throughout the human territories. On assignment from the Minister of Defense, the two undertake a mission to Alpha, an ever-expanding metropolis where species from across the universe have converged over centuries to share knowledge, intelligence, and cultures. At the center of Alpha is a mysterious dark force which threatens the peaceful existence of the City of a Thousand Planets, and Valerian and Laureline must race to identify the menace and safeguard not just Alpha, but the future of the universe.
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What critics say influenced Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
The big mystery at the film’s center shouldn’t be too surprising if you’ve ever seen a Besson-directed or produced action movie (it shares certain themes with District B13, The Transporter 3 and Space Jail), which leaves a hole where the film’s tension or suspense should be.
This is a film of classic picaresque construction – it is said to be one of the primary influences on Star Wars – but possesses a winning, winking cheekiness, as that of a septuagenarian professor who has outgrown his longheld stuffiness, and has now taken to giggling with students and pointing out the bawdy jokes in ancient Greek plays.
Although scholars consider the pulp source material to have been an influence on George Lucas’ original “Star Wars” movie, the equation clearly works the other way around in Besson’s hands, as “ Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets ” finds the director doing his best “Star Wars” impression.
The first act, which deals with a recovery mission that (of course) goes slightly awry, captures the gee-whiz sci-fi adventure of George Lucas’s first Star Wars movie.
He’s a key figure in the so-called Cinéma du look, a term coined by critic Raphaël Bassan in 1989 to describe the spectacular visual stylings of movies like Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang and Besson’s Subway.
Science fiction in film goes all the way back to Georges Méliès’ 1902 film, A Trip to the Moon, and since the very beginning, the best ones showed us a world wholly new and exciting, something the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
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But it’s populated by a light-blue race of thin, elongated aliens right out of Avatar.
Spiraling through the same vertiginous terrain as such nutty, chock-a-block sci-fi epics as Avatar and David Lynch’s weird-on-weird Dune, the mega-expensive Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets flaunts a visual imagination on fire—and a human pulse that’s at best sporadic.
Luc Besson and his team out-“Avatar” James Cameron when it comes to state-of-the-art eye candy.
The IMAX 3D release of Avatar back in 2009 was the last time that I remember watching something that was a hailed as a technological game-changer and needed to be experienced in the theater.
Valerian wakes with a start after a nightmare in which he witnesses the destruction of a peaceful oceanic planet, whose inhabitants resemble the Na’vi from James Cameron’s Avatar .
The fingerprints of Avatar are all over the worst parts of Valerian, notably in the people of the planet Mül, who are very tall and very nice.
Spiraling through the same vertiginous terrain as such nutty, chock-a-block sci-fi epics as Avatar and David Lynch’s weird-on-weird Dune, the mega-expensive Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets flaunts a visual imagination on fire—and a human pulse that’s at best sporadic.
Valerian (Dane DeHaan) is a government space agent of some kind who acts like Han Solo and dresses like Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” (hang onto those Hawaiian shirts, apparently they’re gonna come back in style in 700 years).
In the midst of retrieving the creature, by means of metallic sleeves that allow them to travel between different dimensions (don’t ask), Valerian relentlessly begs Laureline to marry him, establishing a rapport that’s part His Girl Friday and part videogame filler dialogue.
They have a screwball His Girl Friday-like banter.
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The plot revolves around a kind of space hedgehog that shits pearls, and the opening sequence, an expository time lapse showing the evolution of the titular “city of a thousand planets,” a massive space station that eventually comes to encompass all of the knowledge of the known universe, is one of the greatest examples of opening scene-setting since Zack Snyder’s Watchmen opening .
Technically it is just the opening credits sequence, but not even Watchmen's brilliant, tuneful introduction is as perfect.
How can you create a truly groundbreaking Judge Dredd film after Paul Verhoeven already made one, but called it RoboCop?