Review of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) by J K — 28 Jul 2017

Why Valerian Failed at the Box Office.

The movie is great for the graphic backgrounds alone, but the movie going crowd stayed away. Why?

1) The story is plot-based science fiction, which is the most common style of written sci-fi...This does not translate well to the big screen. Most popular movie "sci-fi" is character-based fiction, based on the Joseph Campbell Hero with a Thousand Faces type model of character development arc. Movie viewers who grew up with Star Wars and a hundred Disney projects are used to and expecting another remake to the heroic fiction genre, especially when set in space.

2) Valerian is an unsympathetic psychopath at the core. He is a hired murderer who beds down everything that moves while performing his assignments. Psychopaths have no empathy for anyone. Nobody wants this guy for their next best friend. For a viewer who wants to see yet another version of Luke Skywalker or Hans Solo on the big screen, this is a disappointment.

3) Since the movie does not follow the heroic cycle, it is very hard to identify the archetypal characters. If Besson had written Laureline as the protagonist-heroine, then Valerian could have become the antagonist. This would have made for some interesting drama, since they were forced to work together on assignment. Too bad he didn't, but that probably was not part of the original comic.

4) The stakes were not high enough to justify the ticket price and the time to see it. What is ultimately at stake here is restoring to the poor victims their lost petty-bourgeois lifestyle, a life of luxury on an idyllic beach. Who cares? This is not a show about saving the planet or galaxy, which would have justified the oversized graphics & backgrounds.

5) The little hybrid rat-reptile that shits magical pearls is ridiculous. This device has no place in technology-based sci-fi, even the comic book did have it. Come on, Mr. Besson...you could have turned this into a high tech gadget from the future that condenses photons into matter or something like that. That would have worked better than a cute reptile that shits magical pearls, a device which the whole story turns on...

6) What the viewer gets out of going to a movie is feelings. After the ending with the cute reptile restored to its owners and shitting more magical pearls, the only feeling most viewers have is "why did I spend my money here? I could have watched Dunkirk or Spider Man instead.".