Currently available to rent on iTunes, Vudu, and Redbox
Director: Luc Besson
Starring: Dane Dehaan, Cara Delevigne, Clive Owen, Rihanna
Movie Guy – “Think Star Wars. But, like, Indiana Jones. But, like, also James Bond. We can find some old, beloved foreign media to base it on.”
Studio Executive – “Wow. Sounds like it can’t miss.”
MG – “There are gonna be so many cool aliens. Ones that live in water, ones that are like us, ones that are, uh, flying.”
SE – “Ehhh…”
MG – “It’s cool. You’ll see. We’ll get the girl from Suicide Squad. That movie KICKED ASS.”
SE – “You are kind of losing me, just keep the story simple though, okay?”
MG – “Done.”
Valeriean and the City of a Thousand Planets is set in space. That’s the simple part. Valerian (played by Dane Dehaan) and Laureline (played by Cara Delevigne) are Federal Agents that work together to do things…for…the government…of Earth. I think. They are sent on a mission to go retrieve a converter (a very CGI looking lizard dog) from a market you can only see if you wear special glasses (confusingly, everything you buy at the market is real once you leave. Again, this is just my best guess).
They come across what looks like a black market deal to purchase a converter by mean looking fat aliens and Water-Peace (made-up name) Aliens who were almost wiped from existence in the opening credits of the film. Once the converter is retrieved, Valerian’s arm gets stuck in the sunglass dimension with the market. The reaction from the people in the movie is that this could kill him somehow. I believe them.
Once they get out they meet their obviously good General boss guy and their obviously bad Commander boss guy (Clive Owen). The Water-Peace Aliens steal the Commander Bad Guy because they think he has the CGI lizard dog. He does not.
A bunch of stuff happens and you realize the Avatar Water-Peace Liquid Aliens are good, as suspected and the bad guy is, you guessed it, bad. The main actor kisses the main actress on a beach, just like they talked about the whole movie.
Ok, you now know as much as I do about the movie I watched intently for two hours. It’s not good. The heroes aren’t charismatic. Delevigne is much better that Dehaan, but neither is great. The dialogue makes absolutely no sense at times. For example, Valerian, after breaking every imaginable rule you could think of in the military, has to decide if he’ll break yet another one, which causes him to think real hard, for 15-20 seconds before deciding to break said rule, thus not completely ruining the movie.
For a movie with several low points, there just weren’t enough high points to balance them out. Ethan Hawke appears for about 5 minutes and doesn’t do much other than over act in what is, to no fault of his, a boring character.
Bubble, played by Rihanna, is a shape-shifting dancer who is enslaved. This character could have been very interesting, but instead, they chose to have it portrayed by Rihanna.
It’s Pocahontas with action, but without the heart. It’s Avatar without the visuals or the plot. This movie tries to be a lot of things, and gets close on almost all of them. But to be worth a watch list, you have to do something good. And this movie, sadly, doesn’t cut it.
Is it Watchlist-worthy? Nope
