Review of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) by James R — 21 Jul 2017

A visually beautiful film that has a really great first half, but falls flat on the second half. Valerian is based on a french comic of the same name and follows Major Valerian (Dane Dehaan) and Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne) two intergalactic police that are are on a mission to uncover the secret behind the destruction of a planet and species.

Their adventure brings them to the vast space station Alpha which is home to thousands of different species. Here at Alpha they uncover a plan involving a traitor amongst them! So I'm being pretty vague here since the film mostly just focuses on Valerian and Laureline.

There's some very cool sci-fi elements in this film and like I said before the movie is just beautifully done with massive amounts of CGi. The movie just falls so flat by the second half. It seems like it just starts jumping scene to scene and theres very little reasoning for some of the second half sub plots that don't progress the movie anymore than it needs to.

The leads are also a mixed bag. I really enjoyed Cara Delevingne. She's really great as Laureline and she's a strong character. Dane DeHaan was a miss for me. I felt like Valerian should have been a bit older and it just seems like DeHaan is never comfortable as the character.

Also their relationship/romance seems so damn forced in this one. There's a lot of positives for this film but unfortunately the negatives are just too blaring. It's worth a rental at best!