Review of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) by Jay T — 31 Jul 2017

*** Spoiler Alert! *** Ultimately, a disappointment. I went to see a film made by a master ... If the "Fifth Element" was a space opera (and an excellent one), Luc Besson's latest is ... space vaudeville, at best. I don't see how anyone can enjoy it being stark sober. Surely, Besson's brilliance did shine through at times - the dimension bending of the Big Market, the sets, the aliens (not the annoying Polynesian Sea-Elves, all the other ones), cute alien pets, timely political message, Rihanna ....

But the bad by far outweighs the good, it is a vaudeville after all - horrible casting, hair-thin plot, absolutely awful dialogue, plot twists do idiotic they insult your intelligence, etc. The Twerp and the Ice Queen, the heroes de jure, are so unbelievably wooden I found most of the aliens more relatable. Despite the love-saturated dialogue, as if written by a 14-year old for whom English is clearly not the native language, there is an absolute zero chemistry between the two. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the two actually hated each other on the set. But it's the degree of infantility of it all that bugged me the most - the scene where the Ice Queen finally sheds a tear in the very end, after a long tirade about love that makes very little actual sense, is idiotic - the Twerp, after repeatedly firing guns and missiles during a pursuit at quarters teaming with civilian aircraft and undoubtedly hitting residential areas, after busting through a dozen of contained from each other ecosystems (causing a minor catastrophe for their inhabitants?), after murdering a Froglodyte emperor (another idiocy - how come there are Bronze Age human-eating froglodytes on a giant space station?) and his bodyguards, and culminating with a beatdown of the supreme commander of his own armed forces just seconds prior, now digs his heels about handing over a pear-pooping lizard to its rightful owners on the grounds of it being government property? That makes sense only to a child. As would the astonishingly beautiful aliens that kick off the movie - beautiful, but so annoyingly perfect it gets under your skin kind of fast. How in the world would a bunch of Stone Age Polynesian Sea Elves survive the destruction of their planet and then decades afterwards by being stuck inside a human cruiser that by the time they stepped into it a) was shut up and down; b) went through an uncontrolled reentry, and c) crashed, hard, with no survivors on board. But no, not only they survived, they built a new civilization with technology rivaling that of any other advanced species, all in 30 short years, half that time free floating in space. Yeah, right.

Enough ranting. Ideas presented in this movie are tremendous. If Besson only spent a couple hundred thousand dollars of the film's immense $200 million budget on a professional sci-fi writer, this would be a masterpiece that would change the world. I'm not joking. But as it stands, it was a waste of my time.