Valerian & The City Of A Thousand Planets (To Infinity Retrospective)

Do I have to? Ugh. Fine. Okay, like, welcome to the To Infinity Retrospective, a series created in preparation for Rise Of Skywalker. Blah, blah, blah. Look, we’re only 18 days out from the premiere, so we had to do one more of these. And what better way to end this series of Space Opera reviews than with Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets? (He said sarcastically). What’s it about? Hell if I know, but keep reading and try to find out.

Alpha, the city of a thousand planets, is a space station where humans and aliens live in peace. Or so you think, until the day an unknown species of bald, white-skinned people break in, and capture Commander Flint, the human’s leader. Agents Valerian and Laureline are given the task of rescuing him, but, as they investigate, they realized there’s more to this crime, and the commander, than once thought.

Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets is, in many ways, the French John Carter. Like John Carter, Valerian is based off of a classic, pulp sci-fi source. Also like John Carter, it was a passion project of its director, Luc Besson. And, most importantly, it was unbelievably expensive to make, and totally bombed at the box office. Valerian even has some of the same problems as John Carter, such as an overly convoluted plot, and horribly miscast leads. But what’s perhaps the most frustrating about Valerian is how scatter-brained it feels. There really is no central plot. There’s just a series of little side quests, like a trip to a VR market, a hunt for a glowing jelly fish, and a detour to an alien red light district, which just feels like the director coming up with ways to distract the main characters long enough for the film to reach feature length. And speaking of the main characters, Dane Dehaan and Cara Delevingne are horrible. They’re supposed to be charming badasses with playful, witty banter, and they come off as petulant middle schoolers. This is due, in large part, to the fact that they have no chemistry. There’s also a whole subplot where Valerian wants Laureline to marry him, and she doesn’t think he’s mature enough, which confused me. Valerian proposing implies that they’ve been dating, or at least sleeping together, for a while. But the dialogue they have, and the way they interact, give the impression that he’s just been hitting on her, and she thinks he’s annoying. And if that’s the case, the film’s got a kind of creepy message about how men should keep pushing women to do things they don’t want to.

Now, to be fair, the film has positive qualities, like awesome effects, a quick pace, and some cool ideas, like a market that you can only access if you have on VR goggles. But virtually all Space Operas have cool visuals. Even a film as silly and oddball as Jupiter Ascending has them. And it, at least, is entertainingly bad. Valerian isn’t even fun. It just feels self-indulgent, like a 12-year-old boy building a lego world where he can win all the awards, and get all the girls, he can’t in real life. So, yeah. I wouldn’t recommend it.

…

And that’s it! I’m officially done with my To Infinity Retrospective. And, I’ll be honest, I’m kind of sad it’s over. Sure, it’s been a bumpy, wildly uneven ride, with me touching upon everything from genuinely underrated gems, to campy guilty pleasures, to boring, over-bloated messes, but, overall, I had a fun time. I got to cover some of the most unique, visually-striking films ever made. I got to see  strange new worlds that, even if they were trapped in bad stories, were clearly made by people with talent. And I learned. I learned about what does and doesn’t make a space opera work. I learned that humor, heart, simple stories and well-matched leads are just as important as groundbreaking visual effects. And I learned to appreciate what George Lucas and the countless other people who brought us Star Wars did even more.

And now, the Space Operas I covered, listed from favorite to least favorite 

1. The Last Starfighter
2. Avatar
3. Guardians Of The Galaxy
4. Ender’s Game
5. Starship Troopers
6. Titan A.E.
7. Jupiter Ascending
8. John Carter
9. The Fifth Element
10. Valerian & City Of A Thousand Planets
11. Dune

Hopefully you’ve had as much fun reading these reviews as I had writing them. And hopefully, you learned a thing or to for your own creative works. May the Force be with you all.