Debuting in a 1967 issue of Pilote magazine in France, the “Valérian et Laureline” science fiction adventures written by Pierre Christin and drawn by Jean-Claude Mézières became an immediate hit in Europe. Chronicling the adventures of square-jawed spatio-temporal agent Valérian and his partner Laureline—a French peasant from the 11th century who travels to the future with Valérian—the stories continued until 2010.
The stories inspired an animated series in 2007, and ten years after that, Luc Besson gave us a feature film version.
The comic book stories had Valérian and Laureline travelling through time as well as space, under the auspices of the Spatio-Temporal Agency. Once time travel became a reality in the 28th century, the agency was formed to stop people from messing with the timelines.
This enabled Mézières to draw many different times and places, as well as a very lived-in future world filled with dozens of aliens. (The “Valérian et Laureline” comic art was a major influence on the visual design of Star Wars.) After Galaxity, the capital of the Terran Empire, disappeared in a temporal paradox, Valérian and Laureline became freelance agents, while trying to find their lost home.
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Empress of Forever
The notion of doing a film based on the comics was first brought to the attention of Luc Besson, long a fan of the comics, when he hired Mézières to work on The Fifth Element. According to an interview with Besson in Deadline, the artist asked the director, “Why are you doing this shitty film? Why you don’t do Valérian?”
Besson didn’t seriously consider it at the time, because technology in 1997 wasn’t, he felt, up to the task of portraying all the alien creatures. By the time James Cameron’s Avatar came out in 2009, Besson realized that he could do it.
It took another eight years for it to make it to the screen, quickly becoming the most expensive film in French history.
Dane DeHaan (last seen in this rewatch in Amazing Spider-Man 2) and Cara Delevingne (last seen in this rewatch in Suicide Squad) were cast as Valerian and Laureline. Besson dispensed entirely with the time-travel element, instead having the two leads be military agents of the 28th-century United Human Federation, with Laureline’s past as a French peasant removed as well.
The rest of the cast includes Clive Owen (last seen in this rewatch in Sin City), Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Kris Wu, Alain Chabat, Sam Spruell, Sasha Luss, the voices of John Goodman and Elizabeth Debicki, and a brief cameo by Rutger Hauer (also last seen in this rewatch in Sin City). In addition, several directors and writers with whom Besson has worked over the years made cameos as captains of Alpha who welcomed alien species aboard.
The movie was no kind of hit, and a sequel seems unlikely, though Besson keeps saying he wants to do one.
“I’d rather that you took me somewhere other than a giant trash can”
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
Written and directed by Luc Besson
Produced by Virginie Besson-Silla
Original release date: July 17, 2017
We get an overview of the future history of space travel, starting with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in the 1970s and the International Space Station in the 2000s, going to first contact with alien life in the 22nd century, with the ISS renamed Alpha Station and regularly added on to, until it was too big to remain safely in orbit. So they sent it out into the galaxy because reasons.
Four hundred years later, and we look in on a pleasant alien world where everyone seems happy. We mostly see it from the POV of a woman living on a beach, where they harvest balls of energy and there are cute lizard-like animals that eat matter and then excrete multiples of the same thing. So, for example, if you feed it a diamond, it then poops lots of diamonds.
The world is then destroyed when it’s caught in the crossfire of a space battle—
—and then Major Valerian wakes up from a dream. Turns out, he dreamt all that about the alien world, and didn’t recognize the world or the species living on it.
Valerian appears to have been sleeping on a beach, but it’s actually an illusion created by their ship, Alex. Valerian steps out of the fake beach and tries to convince his partner, Sergeant Laureline, to marry him. Laureline wants no part of marrying him due to his lengthy history of brief relationships with coworkers.
Their new assignment is to retrieve a Mül converter—which is one of the lizard-like animals from Valerian’s dream. It’s in the hands of a criminal named Igon Siruss. Igon works on a planet where the “big market” is in another dimension. Using a device that allows his weapon to be out of phase with the dimension, Valerian sneaks into the transaction Igon is having—with, it turns out, aliens who look like the ones from Valerian’s dream.
Valerian succeeds, barely, in taking both the converter and the tiny energy ball the aliens were using as payment. Laureline saves him by fixing his damaged dimensional shifter thingie. Igon sends a weapon-proof monster after them and their backup team. Said backup team is all killed by the monster while Valerian and Laureline manage to barely get away, without a single thought given to the four guys who just died protecting them.
They travel to Alpha Station, which is now huge, and which has representatives from all known worlds living there. We learn this when Valerian and Laureline ask Alex for information about the station, even though it’s their headquarters and they’ve been there a million times. Nonetheless, the computer provides lengthy and detailed exposition about this station in the clumsiest manner possible. (Keep in mind that a professional screenwriter of more than 30 years’ standing wrote this, and it was his passion project.)
Alpha has its own problems: there’s a dead zone, filled with radiation, and it’s expanding. Commander Arün Filitt orders Valerian and Laureline to protect him while he speaks to delegates from all the various worlds.
In the midst of that meeting, the station is attacked, with Filitt kidnapped. (They think he has the converter, but actually Laureline is holding it.) The attackers are more of the aliens from Valerian’s dream. Valerian goes after them, chasing them into the dead zone, where Laureline and the remaining military lose track of him. General Okto Bar, now in charge with Filitt kidnapped, orders Laureline placed under arrest so he doesn’t lose both his best agents in one day.
Laureline escapes custody with appalling ease and goes after Valerian. She finds him unconscious, having crashed his flyer in the dead zone. After she revives him, she is distracted by a butterfly. Despite having been given exhaustive exposition about Alpha, Laureline apparently doesn’t know that the butterflies will kidnap you if you touch them. She’s kidnapped by one and taken to the Boulan Bathors. They won’t let aliens in (who aren’t kidnapped, in any case), so Valerian recruits Bubble, a shapechanging exotic dancer, promising her freedom and a proper government ID if she helps him. She reluctantly agrees—she considers herself an artist and hates the idea of playing a part she hasn’t rehearsed.
General Bar is confused by the fact that Filitt has been torturing an alien prisoner, and is also appalled to see that Mül is classified above his rank. (Valerian discovered the same thing earlier.) Bar gets the ministry to declassify it for him, and learns that Mül was destroyed thirty years ago during a war. But it’s officially listed as uninhabited.
Meanwhile, Laureline has become a handmaiden for the emperor of the Boulan Bathors. As she’s serving the emperor, Valerian and Bubble arrive to rescue her, and they escape through a garbage chute. Bubble is wounded in the fight, and dies, urging Valerian to love Laureline fiercely.
They go deeper into the dead zone, only to discover that it isn’t dead, but plenty breathable. They find Filitt a prisoner of the aliens from the dream, who are called the Pearl. Their princess, before she died during the attack, sent a telepathic message through time and space, which wound up in Valerian’s head. The Pearl on Alpha are the last survivors, as they took refuge in a crashed ship that survived the destruction of Mül, Eventually, they wound up in Alpha.
They need the converter and the energy sphere to power the ship, which they’ve repaired, and go to a world they can terraform to suit their needs.
Filitt admits to his role in the near-genocide of the Pearl. At first he tries to pawn it off as a mistake, that the scanners detected no life on the world, but eventually Filitt confesses to it all. He had to end the war, and if he admitted that he wiped out most of a species, Earth would have been kicked out of Alpha, and it would have destroyed the Federation’s economy.
Valerian knocks Filitt out and gives them the converter. Laureline wants him to give them the energy sphere, too, and he won’t at first, because it’s evidence, but he gives in eventually.
Bar has sent soldiers after Valerian and Laureline, but Filitt also had a backup plan: his personal guard of K-Tron robot soldiers, who attack both the Pearl and Bar’s people and Valerian and Laureline. They’re ultimately defeated, Filitt is arrested, and the Pearl are able to leave Alpha in their ship to find their new world. Valerian and Laureline are left adrift in another ship, and Laureline finally gives Valerian a maybe to his marriage proposal as they await rescue.
“A soldier will always choose death over humiliation”
This was one of the worst-reviewed movies of 2017, which is why I never saw it until I got to it this week.
The bad reviews, if anything, undersold it.
This isn’t the worst movie I’ve done in this rewatch—the existence of Man-Thing and Son of the Mask and Justice League of America and the 1990 Captain America and the 1994 Fantastic Four and several others make that impossible—but it’s definitely in the conversation.
It’s amusing that the release of Avatar is one of the things that prompted Luc Besson to go ahead with Valerian, and both movies are pretty much the same: beautiful, gorgeous visuals done in by mediocre acting and a truly dreadful script.
The script honestly feels like it wandered in from 1967, when the comic debuted, from the sexism to the simplistic dialogue to the clunky exposition. Besson can’t seem to make up his mind whether or not he’s writing the later version of Valerian who goes his own way and is a bit of a rogueish maverick or the earlier version who always meticulously followed orders no matter what. Laureline, meanwhile, having been stripped of her comics origin, is instead maddeningly inconsistent, going from ultra-competent and by-the-book to being stupid and hating people who follow the rules.
The running time of this movie is two and a quarter hours, and you feel every excruciating nanosecond of it. I felt like I’d been watching it for several weeks when I checked to see that I was only halfway through.
It’s too bad because, like Avatar, it’s a visual feast. Besson and his set designers and CGI folks and cinematographers all did amazing work creating a future universe. The Pearl in particular are beautifully realized aliens, and the opening sequence where humans meet up with various aliens is a ton of fun.
The entire sequence on Mül is also a joy, as the Pearl seem to be genuinely happy people whose lives we get a lovely entrée into. They’re just different enough to be weird, but familiar enough to be happily recognizable—and then they’re almost all killed, our POV character being one of the deaths.
At that point, we get saddled with Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne for the rest of the film, which goes straight into the toilet.
I cannot find a single good thing to say about either DeHaan’s or Delevingne’s work in this movie. They come across as bored teenagers who don’t actually want to be acting in a movie today, but fine, we’ll do it, I guess. At no point are they even remotely convincing as professional soldiers. (Hell, at no point are they even remotely convincing as professional actors.) Their line deliveries are flat, not aided by Besson’s mediocre dialogue, their action sequences are labored and unconvincing, and their chemistry is almost comically nonexistent. Seriously, these two are about as romantic as a fried egg and a cactus, and either would’ve been better casting choices. These two are now the gold standard (tin standard?) for a chemistry-free romantic coupling on screen, leaving Chakotay-Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager and James Bond-Christmas Jones in The World is Not Enough in the dust.
It really is Avatar all over again: a triumph of world-building and cinematography over writing and acting. The former is glorious; the latter is DOA.
Next week, one last dip into the 20th century, as we look back at 1984’s adaptation of Sheena.
Keith R.A. DeCandido urges everyone to buy his newest book Alien: Isolation, which is now available in audio from Blackstone Audio (read by Sarah Mollo-Christiansen), as well as paperback and eBook.
“…and then they’re almost all killed, among the deaths our POV character.”
It feels like the last part of that sentence is missing.
I never saw this. It was clear just from the trailers that the two leads were immeasurably blander than the film around them; they seemed miscast and out of place even though I had zero familiarity with the source material.
Also, while the visuals did look impressively lush, I found them too much so for my tastes. I’ve just gotten tired of the sheer visual clutter and sensory overload of today’s CGI blockbusters. No matter how gorgeously rendered they are, there are just too many things on the screen at once, being flung at me too fast to process, and so I can’t really appreciate them.
Sometimes nonsense looks much better in one media than it does another.
Man, now I really want to see a V&L comic drawn by Tradd Moore
Christopher: Ugh, I phrased that badly. Will fix.
And honestly in this case, the visual clutter, when it was there, worked, and it wasn’t always there. In particular, the second sequence after the history lesson, with the people on Mül, was glorious, one of the best alien landscapes I’ve seen outside the Henson Creature Shop.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I really enjoyed watching this in the theatre, so I got the blu-ray and rewatched it eagerly.
Those gorgeous visuals that let me overlook all the bad and mediocre stuff when it was on a giant screen turned out to not quite be enough when I was in my living room.
What a dud of a movie. We’re on a long streak of bad movies here on the rewatch (Sheena next week? Ugh). I don’t think we will get to a pretty good movie until…Venom? I liked it well enough.
Thanks for a great review.
I’m a diehard Besson fan, and yet I spent those two and a quarter hours wondering, “What the frack was he SMOKING?” Sure, there are some saving graces –the visuals are astonishing, and Rihanna’s sad/sensual turn was a pleasant surprise.
But –good grief! “The script honestly feels like it wandered in from 1967, when the comic debuted, from the sexism to the simplistic dialogue to the clunky exposition” is exactly right. And the casting of the protagonists is a head-scratcher. DeHaan, a pencil-necked 30-year-old who looks almost prepubescent, and who spoke and behaved as if he were doing a particularly bad Keanu Reeves impression, is simply not Keanu, and never will.
I thought about seeing this in the theaters, but second-guessed myself and consigned it to rental. Normally when I do that, there’s a 50/50 chance I’ll forget to ever rent it, but my interest was high enough that I did in this case. I find that now I can’t really remember anything about the movie, except that it was very pretty, and thinking that both the leads seemed rather young to be the experienced space agents they were supposed to be. Which is a shame, because I’d like to support pretty sci-fi films that aren’t part of an established franchise, but there needs to be at least some sensible writing involved.
I acknowledge this isn’t a perfect movie. And when the reviews came out and were quite…unkind, I had no desire to see it in cinemas. But a year later or so, found myself watching it on TV and I must confess I was enthralled. This is just a fun, enjoyable, very pretty movie. I actually enjoyed watching it so much I bought the DVD! A bit of a guilty pleasure, perhaps. I even recognize that computer infodump about Alpha was one of the most inane examples of exposition I’ve ever seen in a movie. The market sequence was (and is!) a pure joy to watch. This movie just felt different than most sci-fi movies I’ve seen lately and even the acting contributed to make it feel unique and non-cookie-cutter. I appreciate that. And the action scenes are great fun, the humor is quirky and off-key and delightful…and again, the aliens and other-worldliness of it all greatly impressed me. I haven’t seen a movie this imaginative in some time.
I realise this movie isn’t for everyone!! But it’s a fun romp and I greatly enjoyed.
Austin: after Sheena, we’ve got the 2015 Fantastic Four, then Inhumans, and then Venom, before diving into MCU Phase 3, which will be followed by the remaining 2019 films.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I had a very different reaction to this film. It’s garbage, don’t get me wrong, but I found every moment spent with Delevingne’s character, especially ones that didn’t involve Valerian, delightful. She was consistently fun and honestly I became a fan of her as an actress because of this movie. She still haven’t been in any movie I haven’t hated though, so I’m hoping Carnival Row will be good at least.
It’s pretty clear that as written, Valerian should have been cast with some one more traditionally movie star handsome with a self-aware sense of comic timing; Someone like Chris Hemsworth, or Bruce Campbell or Kurt Russell in their prime.
I will say this though, the teaser trailer using the Beatles ”Because” was phenomenal at building anticipation for the film, even if it didn’t live up to it, and the scene set to ”Space Oddity” I found quite moving.
I haven’t actually seen this. And I enjoy Luc Besson’s work. Fifth Element is a classic in every aspect. I do recall hesitating to watch this one because of the reviews at the time. And I wasn’t about to spend 140 minutes of my life watching a potentially slow-paced sci-fi slog. I guess my fears were justified.
The other reason I didn’t get around to watching it can be summed up by one name: Dane DeHaan.
I have no idea what do people see in him. Always comes across as someone sleepwalking through his roles. He was a forgettable villain in the last Webb Spider-Man entry. And supposedly, there was a campaign to place him as a frontrunner towards playing young Han Solo (could I imagine that film being even more sleep-inducing?). As it is, even Aldenreich trumps him.
For me the first ten minutes were magic. To their soundtrack of Major Tom, primitive space is station Alpha expands in a series series of vignettes showing a succession of greetings in the airlock. From new human crew to the first alien arrivals.
After that I thought that the wrong actors were chosen. Valerian is much older that Laureline in the books. He is a top agent and handsome with it. . Laureline is also portrayed as a French curvy and glamorous.
I found the acting or possibly the direction led to wooden dialogue. It was such a disappointment
It sounds like everyone agrees about this one. I too loved the visuals, the action, Rihanna,Herbie Hancock (!?!). Didn’t care for the plot and dialog, but I’ve enjoyed worse. But the protagonists were just so unlikable! For the space station and the pearl people I was asking why people thought this was a bad movie. Then Valerian and Laureline show up and I understand completely.
They came across to me as shallow, selfie obsessed teens, and I have to wonder if Besson thought that’s what the kids want these days. I’m 65, but I’m pretty sure they don’t.
Still, I did buy the Blu-ray (used) – or maybe that was Jupiter Ascending, the other beautiful but terrible movie that I wanted to love.
“(Hell, at no point are they even remotely convincing as professional actors.) “
Nice burn.
@11. Edouardo: “Dane DeHaan… I have no idea what do people see in him”
I think of it as the MTV kids effect. They still run those silly awards, don’t they? He was the It Boy for a minute to them. Same thing happened with Miles Teller (which we may touch upon with the FF 2015 review). They flare up and are declared “hot” by some nebulous entity, then they flame out. (I remember Teller in an interview being beyond smug about his coming stardom.)
Attempted to watch this a couple times. Never made it past the initial Alpha sequence.
How’s it stack against Jupiter Ascending? Similar levels of awfulness?
Dane Dehaan looks like an incel. I said it.
Jupiter Ascending actually has a lot of merit to it. Much better than this one. (I’ve only seen JA, though. I don’t have much time on my hands.)
I was interested in seeing this when it came out, but the reviews made me hesitate. I eventually caught it on Amazon Prime, and I thought it was entertaining enough. The visuals were stunning, and I thought that the marketplace planet in the other dimension was an interesting concept.
I’m in no hurry to watch it again, though
Sunspear: While I intellectually know I’ve seen Jupiter Ascending, I remember precisely nothing about it, so I can’t compare, and am in no rush to see it again for comparison purposes. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@@@@@ 13: Alas, I bought it, too. I also love to hate Jupiter Ascending. That is another movie that could have been excellent, and somehow got derailed. It makes me want to slap Eddie Remayne every time, though. My fingers itch even as I write this.
@15/Sunspear: I don’t mind the MTV effect that much. Sometimes, we still get good actors out of it. Miles Teller’s no Oscar contender, but at the very least, he starred in a terrific film (Whiplash). And there are those like Robert Pattinson who have been able to carve a new identity, forsaking past trends.
But DeHaan is still a mystery to me. Came out of nowhere, being hailed as the next coming, but who hasn’t really done a role I could go back and recall fondly. In fact, none of the films he’s done are remotely praise-worthy.
@19: I did like A Cure for Wellness –-except for him, of course. I call him the Wimpy Cipher.
@19/Eduardo: I think that DeHaan’s breakout role was in Chronicle, which was a pretty impressive film (at least, I liked it the first time, but not so much the second once the novelty of the found-footage format had worn off). I figure it was the popularity of that film that got him other roles, though I haven’t really liked him in any of his roles that I’ve seen. (It was also a prominent early film role for Michael B. Jordan, who’s gone on to greater things.)
Me, I love Jupiter Ascending.
This one, though … sigh. I’ll just join onto the “stunning visuals but everything else is garbage” refrain. Dane DeHaan has … whatever the exact opposite of screen presence is; whenever he was on screen, I was looking at everything in the frame except him.
And the opening section (the story of Alpha) was lovely but doesn’t actually make any sense at all — if they started the space station drifting in, what, 2100, by 2800 it might have made it somewhere out towards the Oort cloud, if even that’s not giving it too much credit. But it certainly wouldn’t have gone sailing off into the galaxy at large without some big-ass engines or something.
I was so, SO excited for this when it was announced. The Fifth Element is one of my favorite movies, so seeing Besson do another wacky sci-fi romp was catnip to me.
Then I actually saw it.
I actually think it was the most visually stunning film of 2017. I mean, my God is it gorgeous to look at, and also incredibly visually inventive and playful.
Everything else though…YEESH. Just atrocious. It might work best as a movie you throw on at a party in the background and just leave on mute. The visuals would make a great setting for a party, without actually having to listen to the awful dialogue. Just put on some good dance music to accompany it.
How nice that the comic is originally named after the two main characters, male and female, but the movie is only named after him. Also, never felt like seeing this, and now I know I was right. It sounds like a bad idea to remove the time travel element, and change Laureline’s character like that.
@21/Christopher: Truth be told, I haven’t actually seen Chronicle. By the time that came out, I was already burnt out on the found-footage format (the Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity films saw to that).
It should be noted that Jordan, despite being a newbie to features at the time, already had an impressive TV resumé by that point (breakout roles on both The Wire and Friday Night Lights). I knew he was destined for big things.
@22/hoopmanjh: “And the opening section (the story of Alpha) was lovely but doesn’t actually make any sense at all — if they started the space station drifting in, what, 2100, by 2800 it might have made it somewhere out towards the Oort cloud, if even that’s not giving it too much credit. But it certainly wouldn’t have gone sailing off into the galaxy at large without some big-ass engines or something.”
I just rewatched a clip of the opening on YouTube, and they said something about the station going into the “Magellan Current” — maybe that’s supposed to be some kind of natural FTL stream or something. (Hey, maybe that’s what the Moon fell into in 1999!)
Anyway, I’ve seen that clip of the opening once before, and I’m honestly not that enamored with it. It lost me right away with the slapdash “weightless” effects that are really obviously just people hanging on wires. Also, it’s a bit implausible how easily all the aliens catch on to how a handshake is supposed to work. It’s a nice idea, sure, but not this amazingly perfect cinematic sequence it gets touted as.
This movie was somewhat fun to watch in a theater, but it was still a disappointment on many levels. I wonder why Besson could not just follow the source material. There is a huge pile of it, and if a director is not going to follow the source material, why make the movie at all? Everything does not need to be exactly as in the books, but it would be nice if even some of it was.
@17. krad: that could be a new kind of ratings system: what movie or show have you watched, but has left no impression on you whatsoever? Voids instead of stars: 1 void, 2 voids… This would be distinct from just plain bad, or even “so bad it’s good” inversions. These would be non-entities that contribute nothing to your life, a literal waste.
JA would definitely be on the list. On the TV side (streaming) some of Iron Fist is void-worthy.
This may be one of my favorite lines from the rewatch. Its certainly superior to most of the dialog from the movie.
My wife and I love going to the drive-in and there are a lot of horrible movies greatly improved by the drive-in experience (like Ritchie’s King Arthur).
This, unfortunately, was not one of those movies.
I went to go see this, because visually it was the closet that I’ll get to a live action Mass Effect movie
He reviews don’t do this movie justice, and they don’t reflect the point of watching which is the two hour experience. I can easily say my experience watching this movie in theaters was the best of any couple hours staring at a screen in the whole year, and probably longer than that. The enjoyment and the feeling, which you can’t force or fake, the reason you watch movies and the reason sci-fi remains so powerful even when so off-beat.
The casting of the movie was suspect for sure. Like others, I found Cara Delevingne very pleasant throughout but DeHaan was so flat I was shocked that he was even there. Rihanna’s alien, while cooly imaginative, was such a bad performance that it felt like a waste of a plotline.
The story simply wasn’t finished well. It needed an editing pass from fresh eyes and some thematic cleaning up. You definitely have to be a fan of the Fifth Element because it’s all there again but it definitely feels like something got lost in translation.
What this had going for it was imagination. It was, like Avatar, a unique and deep world stretching the bounds of your mind and emotions in wonder. I would hate to see how modern political correctness would impact this, it would be cookie cutter ruin. It needed better writing, or more time on the writing phase, but it was impactful and overwhelmingly delightful to take in on. Just take it in for what it is and don’t worry about what it isn’t.
If you are a fan of sci-fi, especially if you love the Fifth Element, and if you grade movies by your experience watching them rather than on objective comparison to stage and film standards, this will be an incomparable journey into an imaginative and crazy but joyful world. Simple yet satisfying, if not all it could be.
Delevingne was fantastic. The movie should have been called Laureline and that’s it.
DeHaan could be the least likable actor working today. He just oozes bleh.
It took me two days to watch this movie. Watch 10-15 minutes, then take a break, rinse, repeat. I honestly only finished because I was committed to it, kinda like if your fridge breaks down and you have to eat all the perishables before they go bad.
Its horrible. Neither of the leads had any business at all being in the movie. However, I suspect the casting was done less by talent and more by what I would call “we need pretty people with Euro connections”. I think Besson got too cute with his casting and it backfired.
“[W]ithout a single thought given to the four guys who just died protecting them.”
I saw this in the theater and that right there was when I knew the rest of the film was going to suck. I kept hoping against hope that it would somehow get better, but nope.
I’m not sure why but this movie enthralled me. The trailers were great so I was looking forward to it. I saw it in the theater and then twice more on planes during a trip.
I agree the actors could have been better and I hated the entire Rihanna/Bubbles subplot. I liked the humor, the spectacles. I even liked Delevigne and DeHaan. They weren’t cookie-cutter young Hollywood actors who I can’t tell apart anymore.
Watching Clive Owen chew the scenery was great fun.
@32/Adam: “I would hate to see how modern political correctness would impact this, it would be cookie cutter ruin.”
What are you talking about? This movie came out barely two years ago.
@9: Have you seen Paper Towns?
I hadn’t heard of Carnival Row until I read your comment, but a Google search reveals that, alas, it doesn’t seem to be getting much love from the critics. So you may be out of luck again. Still, the premise sounds intriguing enough that I may watch it anyway. (Also, I see it has Jared Harris in it, which is a plus.)
i’ve never seen this, i’ll have to watch now, thanks tor![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
@@.-@, we’re in a long list of non-superhero movies in this superhero movie watch. It’s been months since we’ve seen a superhero.
‘The script honestly feels like it wandered in from 1967, when the comic debuted, from the sexism to the simplistic dialogue to the clunky exposition.” It’s French
@18: I’m a little surprised by your feeling that JA could have been an excellent film, since my impression is that its flaws were inherent in the people making it and therefore could not have been improved without scrapping the entire project and starting from scratch, including the basic plot. In which case it would effectively be a completely different movie.
In this case, Besson can’t argue that someone else failed to realize his vision. If he couldn’t manage it himself, it likely cannot be done – or more probably, this was it, and it was awful.
Quoth Adam: “I would hate to see how modern political correctness would impact this, it would be cookie cutter ruin.”
This movie came out in 2017.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Yet nobody made a fuss about the Pearl looking uncannily like a pallid version of African tribal culture? That does surprise me.
I’ve seen films from 1967, and I’d swear they had plots. And characters. And people acting rationally on occasion.
Having grown up on the comic, I was very much looking forward to this movie. Visually, it was great, I loved the references to the comic, down to the framing of some shots.
Everything else? I was ready to leave right in the middle of it. The dialogues were awful, there’s no chemistry of any kind, the plot started at an adaptation of L’Ambassadeur des Ombres (great book in the series!) and then goes… whoever knows. The tipping point: when you work with a verse as visually rich as Valerian and Laureline and you give the people who lost everything including their planet because of the federation military actions, and who are then called the enemy and terrorists for surviving, clearly Maasai jewellery, I am having questions.
“(Hell, at no point are they even remotely convincing as professional actors.) “
I remember thinking something similar about his performance in Amazing Spiderman 2. Does the guy have any good movies?
Count me in as one who found the movie to be charming and fun, albeit without the need to overly exercise my brain.
@46
But isn’t that the point of the movie? The bad guy is a military man from the Federation, the good guys were the natives who lost their planet. Calling them terrorists was a plot by the bad guy, they just wanted to be left alone in a new world they would build.
Reading this review and comments made me picture Dane DeHaan sitting somewhere reading all this with tears in his eyes.
I rather liked DeHaan in Chronicle. I thought he played the maladjusted Andrew really well.
Will you be reviewing Chronicle as part of this rewatch?
Zero G: Chronicle isn’t based on a comic book, so no. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Saw this in the theater and it was a struggle to stay awake. Yes it looked great and everything but it was boring. I just didn’t care about any of the people or events in this film. I do want to say I kind of hate all the hate Cara D…? gets for this film. For me, she was the only thing in it that was mildly engaging.
Let me add to the consensus… Gorgeous looking with an imaginative setting but forgettable plot and protagonist stunningly miscast. Like some posters, and unlike krad, I think Delevingne is at least passable, and with the right script and direction could have been an awesome Laureline; if Besson had been willing to go full Gallic and have Valerian be in his late-thirties or even forties, with swagger just starting to fade, paired with a rookie Laureline that might even have worked better and been closer to the original book. But I’m just not interested in watching DeHaan on-screen.
I’ve only read V&L in English translation, but to me it mostly reads like “what if James Bond was Doctor Who?” with a dash of Barbarella and I don’t know if that could sell in todays market no matter who made it.
It was a beautiful movie, with some great visuals. I liked the overall arc of the plot, but the details didn’t hang together well. The actors were flat, but they weren’t given very good lines to work with, and when the entire cast is unconvincing, it’s a sign that the direction is to blame more than the individual performances.
I did like Bubbles the shape-changer, but do remember that they paused the entire movie to give her an entire song and dance number, one of many instances where the pacing of the movie was odd.
I found it enjoyable but was frustrated by the fact that it could have been so much better.
Quoth vinsentient: “I’ve only read V&L in English translation, but to me it mostly reads like ‘what if James Bond was Doctor Who?’ with a dash of Barbarella and I don’t know if that could sell in todays market no matter who made it.”
I dunno, man, I would’ve said the same thing about Guardians of the Galaxy any time prior to 2014……….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
You are right that the GOTG movie does have quite an exuberant tone and colourful, could-only-be-CGI visuals. But the Guardians team it was based on was much darker and more cynical in tone. I think through the Annihilation event up to when Quasar re-appears, all of the Marvel space-based stuff was more dark than fun (I’m thinking specifically of Guardians and Nova).
In contrast, Valerian and Laureline has some amount of social commentary, but doesn’t take itself too seriously and you feel like there is a wink to the audience once in a while. But really what I meant was the relationship between the two leads. I watch the occasional French movie and it seems like half of them involve a middle aged man in a relationship with a young twenty something year old, and this dynamic is also present in the original bd. That’s what I’m not sure would go over in today’s climate.
@44/princessroxana:
That’s an interesting question. With Avatar (2009) there was a certain amount of griping about the Na’vi accoutrements (*) being too similar to those of human rainforest tribes. Physically, both are humanoid aliens who are super-elongated, beyond even the most ectomorphic human ethnic groups, because that’s an easy way to make them look elegant and noble. Consider fashion illustration.
For Valerian, as I recall, ever pro-reviewer got as far as “pretty, but the leads have no chemistry” and didn’t bother with any further analysis, and I didn’t pay attention to the peanut gallery. Maybe nobody cared enough to complain? Or the chronic-complainers weren’t sufficiently familiar with African aesthetics to register the similarity?
And their skin is pearlescent, not pallid. (They’re actually called “the Pearls” but I can’t recall if that name is voiced on-screen, or is just a production codename.) This isn’t a texture we’re accustomed to seeing on humanoids (most of our experience is with human actors wearing physical makeup) so it might be difficult to interpret.
(*) Specifically, those of the Omaticaya tribe. The movie spent about two minutes establishing that there were other tribes in other biomes with other aesthetics. The tie-in books explain that the Na’vi are just as widely distributed across Pandora as we are on Earth, and this might be something Cameron, with his ecological bent, intends to explore in the next four movies.
Despite the fact that I hated Fifth Element, the trailer for this looked enticing enough that I actually went and saw it in the theater. It sure was gorgeous, but otherwise pretty horrific. However, I’d expected that and so I didn’t feel ripped off because what I considered that I’d paid for was the visuals. I had actually expected Cara Delevingne to be even worse than she was, so I was a bit pleasantly surprised that she was merely bad. Dane DeHaan, OTOH, might as well have been replaced by a block of granite.
So you’re doing French-language comics too? There are a lot: Tintin, Astérix, the Smurfs, Lucky Luke, Largo Winch… And many that are probably impossible to find in the USA. Then if you decide to handle manga adaptations, this series will definitely never end.
For those who say they usually enjoy Besson’s work… Does it include the “Taxi” series for instance? What I’m saying is his movies are not all The Professional or The Big Blue…
Hmm
Fun Fact: Valerian is an herb-root used in folk remedies to cure insomnia.
Laureline went from a tremendously competent agent, with bad-assed fighting skills, to a literal damsel in distress (dis dress?) once she is on her own. At no point other than the initial dream sequence did Valerian have any sort of psychic connection to the Princess, yet at the end he says the Princess has been in his head the whole time and he understands their language. He claims to be a stickler for following the rules yet he just spent the previous 2-ish hours demonstrating the exact opposite.
I went into this movie knowing it would be a steaming pile, and I wasn’t disappointed. I enjoyed it for the spectacle, however.
@59, Philip Thorne, I guess the movie just wasn’t popular enough to be worth making a fuss over cultural appropriation or whatever you want to call it.
@57 I’ve also been reading some of the comics (in English) after having seen the movie, and I’m not sure that the age gap is quite as big as what you’re describing. Are their ages actually ever stated explicitly in the comic? Because going just by the way they’re drawn, I’d peg Valerian as being 30-something and Laureline in her mid-to-late 20s.
@63: “Laureline went from a tremendously competent agent, with bad-assed fighting skills, to a literal damsel in distress (dis dress?) once she is on her own.”
I don’t disagree with your overall assessment, but I’d argue that statement isn’t entirely accurate. She’s more-or-less on her own for some time while tracking Valerian, and doesn’t lack competence in those scenes. After she’s kidnapped (and given that there are thousands of different species inhabiting this place, she can be forgiven for not knowing that the butterflies were fishing lures), she’s in hostile territory, outnumbered and surrounded by a larger and stronger alien species that doesn’t speak her language. Going along with them until she can figure out their intentions or find an opportunity for escape is a prudent move under the circumstances. The only time she really seems helpless is when it becomes clear that they mean her harm, she tries to run but is stymied by two guards who grab her and are somehow able to lift her up by her hat, despite the fact that it doesn’t appear to be attached to her head in any way, and all she does is flail ineffectually and then scream for Valerian (despite having no knowledge that he’s there in disguise).
@65/Matthew: Wow, even that brief clip was barely watchable.
I can buy the hat thing, though. It was so wide and evidently heavy that it would’ve had to be pretty tight around her skull to avoid slipping off as she walked, and given that it was essentially a serving bowl, it would’ve had to be designed to fit snugly to avoid, err, leaks. So friction alone could probably have held it (or rather, her) in place for a few moments as shown (and it did come off a moment later when she fell). She didn’t look very heavy.
@1/Christopher: I share the same feelings as you do Bennett. Alita: Battle Angel looked sterile by comparrison.
Hi everyone, long time lurker, first time poster here. First, I’d like to congratulate Krad for his always enjoyable reviews, even when small mistakes happen: for instance, the comics weren’t originally called “Valérian et Laureline”, that’s a recent moniker. The original name, which lasted decades, was “Valérian Agent Spatio-Temporel”: they changed it for the 40th anniversary, in 2007, when they realised Laureline became as popular, if not more, than Valérian himself among the fans. Also, “Alex” isn’t the ship’s name, that’s the AI that controls it, the ship itself is the Intruder.
As for the movie, I feel ambivalent about it: as a wacky sci-fi Besson movie, it clicks the right boxes and is a visual feast. But as an adaptation of my favorite comic book series ever it fails miserably. In fact, it fails so bad I don’t even know why Besson, a self-proclaimed fan, bothered to do it.
The movie’s story is a loose adaptation of “L’ Ambassadeur des Ombres” – Ambassador of the Shadows – the series album number… six, first published in 1975. And when I say “loose” I really mean it, as very few elements from it survived intact. Yes, the action still takes place in a gigantic space station where several alien species live in their own habitats, but unlike the movie, it isn’t of human origin: in fact it’s so old no one knows or remembers who started its construction, and that’s a central plot point in the book. Also, unlike the movie, it’s Valerian who gets kidnapped and it’s Laureline who saves him in the end, subverting the usual “damsel in distress” trope. There’s a shapeshifter involved, but it’s again Laureline who hires it to help her rescue attempt, not Valérian… and she even has sex with it! Finally, there’s a “human conspiracy” plot line, but it has nothing to do with the one from the movie.
All said and done, I think Besson let his ego run wild, with the results we all saw
@@@@@ CLB, I ADORE the Shapeshifter! Why wasn’t the whole movie about her or whatever her preferred pronoun is?BTW helpless heroines are SO passe. Would it have ruined the movie if, while fighting frantically and effectively, she shouts something like ‘Where is Valerian when you need him?’
@69/roxana: Err, why was your comment directed at me? I never mentioned a shapeshifter.
No but you were talking about the scene. Maybe I should have addressed myself to Matthew who posted the clip. But don’t you agree the shapechanger is fantastic and Laueline ridiculously lame in the clip?
Matthew @@@@@ 38 – thanks for heads-up on Paper Towns. Somehow I never knew that was a movie. Now need to give it a watch. I wasn’t overly impressed by the book, so hoping movie improves on it. We shall see.
@71/roxana: I could barely tell that there was a shapeshifter in the scene — again, I haven’t seen the movie. I only gradually caught on that the two speaking aliens in the scene were meant to be Valerian and Rihanna’s (?) shapeshifter character, and I only figured the latter out because her mouth moved while Valerian’s didn’t. Beyond that, the whole thing seemed pretty evenly lame.
@62: And like this movie, herbal valerian stinks.
“The script honestly feels like it wandered in from 1967, when the comic debuted, from the sexism to the simplistic dialogue to the clunky exposition.”
Simplistic dialogue and clunky exposition are a 1967 thing? Harsh words about my birth year. I doubt that that’s true.
I’ve read the comics, and liked them. I especially liked Laureline. I haven’t watched the film, but from what I’ve heard, it seems to be considerably more sexist than the comics. I wonder why that is. Is it some new trick? If you want to make a sexist film, adapt a fifty-year-old story and hope that people will blame the source material? Will we see a sexist retelling of Yoko Tsuno next?
What strikes me is both leads look ridiculously young to be experienced agents of any organization.
@@@@@ 76: YES. And wimpy.
Definitely wimpy.
OMG I Loooove Yoko Tsuno! I always thought her globe-trotting adventures were vastly more exciting that Tintin’s. I think it’s the more overtly science fictional aspect of the stories that excite me. I would love the hall out of a modern adaptation.
@79/vinsentient: Me too! As long as it isn’t done by Luc Besson…
As a Canadian (English) having gone to school in France (60’s and 70’s!), Valerian, was in the same reading material as Spirou, Tintin, Marsupilami, Alix, Benoit Brisefer, Achile Talon, Lucky Luke and many other comic book characters completely unknown to North Americans.
What is too bad with this movie and the way it was presented in North America, is that no one knew who Valerian and Laureline were… let alone the origins of Valerian, before Laureline!! :-) There should have been some kind of intro to who they were and what they do and their history (Book 0 Bad Dreams), including THE INFLUENCE of Valerian in the Star Wars movies (Just look it up on the Internet!!). The other thing not know by viewer in North America is that this Movie was based on 2 albums “L’Ambassadeur des Ombres” et “L’Empire des mille planètes”.
I loved the movie , found it cool, but it’s nothing like all my books :-)
Hope fully now that all the series is available in English people will read them and get acquainted with the Characters!!
I would love a sequel…..
Have a great day
JS