Valerian

2017 • 137 minutes

About this movie

In the 28th century, Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne) are a team of special operatives charged with maintaining order throughout the human territories. Under assignment from the Minister of Defense, the two embark on a mission to the astonishing city of Alpha--an ever-expanding metropolis where species from all over the universe have converged over centuries to share knowledge, intelligence and cultures with each other. There is a mystery at the center of Alpha, a dark force which threatens the peaceful existence of the City of a Thousand Planets, and Valerian and Laureline must race to identify the marauding menace and safeguard not just Alpha, but the future of the universe.

Ratings and reviews

This film is visual soup. The plot takes the incredible setting and says "Let's do absolutely nothing interesting and stick to the standard rip offs of Star Wars, Star Trek, and (bizarrely) young-adult romance novels." Massive walls of exposition are poorly and painfully wedged in via clumsy writing while the acting is dull beyond all measure, especially concerning the protagonist, Valerian. The visuals are overly complicated and hard to decipher despite the imagination and effort required to pull them off, and, worst of all, it is impossible to care about anything happening due to absolutely NO cohesion between elements of the film. It really feels like 10 issues of the comic with completely separate arcs and structures hastily stapled together with awful editing. One minute we're running around the surface of Alpha, the city of 1000 planets, the next Rihanna gets a full on music video. At the end of the day, this film is nothing but soup, really bland, overly complicated, and watery soup that tastes vaguely of better scifi.

Typical of contemporary garbage, the film leans heavily on poorly rendered CGI to mask it's infantile ethos and tragically cliche movements. The female lead is nearly amateurish and at times I wasn't sure if she knew there was a take in progress. Angry and juvenile she rolls through scene after scene heroic only in the sense that she could see the movie through to the end. Every rehashed tedious annoying device is present here, presented at a lunatic pace and with not a single justification or salvaging attempt. The male lead, who is an outstanding actor, took a prompt from Christian Bale in that his voice changes from scene to scene, but always annoys, far from a natural or believable cadence. There's not enough time in a day to touch every problem with this movie. One may find it easier to count the good moments in this movie. Yet another lazy artless ideological nightmare veiled by striking disorientating visual effects

I'm afraid this was an instance where the trailers were considerably more interesting than the movie itself. It seems that creating a new environment for storytelling, in this case, proved to be too much of a challenge for all involved. The film starts abruptly with characters for whom we have almost no context as to who they are or why we should care about them. The remainder of the story doesn't provide any additional explanation or reason to care. There are cues that the viewers are supposed to make some kind of an emotional connection with the two main characters. However, there is very little basis to do so. The visuals can be compelling at times. But, to be more than just eye candy, you need more substance to constitute the framework of the film. It seems that the creators leaned far to heavily on the visuals and not nearly enough on storytelling and thus all we're left with is an empty candy shell.