Review of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) by Simon G — 20 Apr 2018

Cheap, flashy, trashy, lazy and superficial. Would be ok-ish movie if not for all the political messages all over the place that simply destroy that little value that movie could potentially have. Most notable aspect is excessive usage of CGI, with extremely weak plot, little to none character development(within 10 minutes of watching movie I had trouble remembering main characters), whole scenes to simply deliver liberal narratives(all boxes got checked, from feminism to immigration, with whole scenes dedicated solely to that), huge logical plot holes, and completely atrocious ending. Couple of combat engagements that characters are in could be interesting, unfortunately lazy writing made them as dull as possible - there is nothing more boring when all opponents seem to suffer from "stormtrooper syndrome", with Valerian simply popping everyone one by one with apparently no effort, while opponents, including K-Tron combat androids, cant hit anything and have armor made out of paper(with one exception, when Valerian disables one and then hides behind him, while being shot at from a dozen different direction - then bot armor is impregnable for some reason).

Valerian is rather dimwitted, shallow, lazy and spineless(there were couple of scenes, where he is shown as almost intelligent man, but few and far between). What was the point to put his name into movie title is unclear, as his partner, Laureline, is clearly written as protagonist and is superior in every way.

Laureline is portrayed as typical feminist delusional version of woman, few steps short of Mary Sue trope. Beautiful, smart, witty, strong, tough, compassionate, driven, knowledgeable etc. Master of all skills with barely any shortcomings. Considering how character is presented she is clearly dominant in this duo, with Valerian being mostly "go fetch" persona.

Movie antagonist gets even less development as main characters do - none - and is there purely because movie needs an antagonist. Typical libtardian cliche - white guy with no positive traits or depth, weak, pathetic and petty. Pretty much done in the same way as movie ending, with almost no effort put into it.

Only even remotely interesting scene in whole movie was probably space battle(hard to say, as whole movie is a CGI fest), but it(and it consequences) is also location of main cluster of logical holes.

If ship got hit with a big bad torpedo, and blew up, then how it managed to crash into planet ? Why there were ships falling down all over the place to begin with(and why they were falling down vertically) ? If it was such a potent weapon to blow up planet, then how this spaceship wreck managed to survive this event(with natives on board), while being on the surface of said planet during destruction ? How exactly species manages to go from building mud huts to developing super-advanced tech in just 30 years, with no external help(seriously, Mui natives are written in such positive manner, that its creepy and they are extremely hard to actually like) ? And what was the deal with jellyfish(its one of those poor writing aspects of movie, certain points got explanation without any need for them, like why would I care about current population of Alpha, but other got none) ? Why ALureline got to keep Mui converter(aside of the fact of insubordination, that would make her less than reliable, being on security detail she is primary candidate for being killed in case of things going wrong; fact that Filitt even accepted this deal dosnt make a lick of sense - he has bunch of bots that he can rely upon 100%, yet he goes with couple of agents that do whatever they want) ? So on and so forth.

Penguins were fun tho.