Review of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) by C U — 22 Jul 2017

Is there a way, perhaps through public subscription, to pay Luc Besson to stop making movies?

At $200m, the most expensive French film ever made, Valerian was fine. It was fine in the sense that, if you.

- subtracted all the stilted, pre-adolescent, sigh-eyeclosing-headshaking-foreheadholding dialogue.

- blurred out your mind-eye's vision sufficiently to push aside the 15-year old conception of what character development is supposed to be in any book written for readers older than 9.

- Abandon obviously unreasonable demands for, say, plot, story or interest.

- Lose these absurd post-highschool drama notions you have of narrative continuity, then...

You get something like a watchable CGI wonderverse.

* 4.5 / 5 stars for art direction.

* 4 / 5 stars for technical expertise.

* Negative two gajillion stars for total and complete cinematic immaturity and buffonish lack of anything approaching the conceptual sentiment of good judgment.

The mystery surrounding the heroic feats that were surely involved in making this film run deep, because there has never in France's entire history been produced sufficient cheese to have strung together even ten pages of this script, so there can be no way to guess as to how it was accomplished. Besson must have drained most of the world's fromage supply to conjure this orgy of narrative madness, maybe pulling it from the alternate dimension that's inhabited exclusively by the ghosts of 14-year-old male fantasies.

And yet, in a stunning act reminiscent of self-flagellating masturbatory self-hatred, Besson took this adolescent soup and plucked out any male human characters worth caring about.

Who invested this $200m in this movie, and what drugs were they doing at the time? And who are their bankers, because I want to make sure everyone gets their money out of *those* banks toute de suite before the run starts.