Review of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) by Frame R — 03 Apr 2018

Is it a bird, a plane? No it's a green screen to add them later.

VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS.

The films opens with a Bowie song, an ok first 3 minutes and then cuts to 100% CGI scene with a twirling creature that I do not care about. The first scene is atrocious, it's overtly melodramatic and luckily we don't experience that level of bad further down the road. After one of the most confusing and least inventive scenes involving a market with several dimension (da f*ck), the film carries on. It fluctuates in quality throughout its too damn long runtime but one thing prevails: CGI. Of course, nothing feels real, everything is a green screen and not a thing is given to distract me from that. What Besson fails to realize is that the fantastic films are always a healthy mixture of practical effects and CGI, because if you rely too much on the computer, all film is contaminated by one idea that we're not in a real place. Besides that, Luc Besson's directing is most of the time lacking, soaring only in the long shots and being paired with the usual overcutting. Most of all, I don't appreciate the work done on the script: it's both too simplistic and exposition-heavy, it's not credible nor smart. It suffers from the chronic disease that Hollywood suffers from which consists on characters only saying what's incredibility relevant leaving every ounce of reality out of the frame. I think a screenwriter should always ask him or herself if that's really how people talk and if it's not, try to create a new way of talking, instead of ending up with a in-between limbo of wanna be quippy. Cara's part (which is one of the few great things in the movie) seems to be written with no thought about developing a character, instead focusing on how much she can smirk after every single sentence. Now remember she sits alongside Dane DeHaan (do not know who decided he had enough charisma or star power to helm a movie) with whom she has no absolute chemistry with. It's as awkward as watching too first degree cousins making out, it feels so unnatural and they're on two such different dimensions that no one feeds of each other's energy. Combine this with the whole array of CGI characters and you have absolutely no one to root for and as a result you do not fear for them. However, it's not all lost, it takes a visionary adapt to screen such a world and there are some scenes that have a nice pace to it. I think the most redeemable quality of it all is that it's a movie filled with some visual spectacle and fair doses of imagination. But, overall, not a great experience... SPOILERS: Rihanna is so unnecessary in this film that I can't put it into words. Why in the world would you build a character whose whole purpose is to aid the main characters just when the plot needs an ex machina, only to kill it 5 minutes later? This is not only a marketing decision of poor taste but also a lazy move. Ed Sheeran, Rihanna, Harry Styles all in one month. Just stick to singing, please...