Miles of Movies

Review:

Film Info:

                                                                                                     Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is                                                                                                       about Agents Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline                                                                                               (Cara Delevingne), two agents working for the                                                                                                           government to figure out what is going on at the                                                                                                       heart of the City of a Thousand Planets, where a                                                                                                       dark, radioactive mass has spawned and continued                                                                                                 to grow. The City of a Thousand Planets is a space-                                                                                                   station housing millions of species, so when Valerian                                                                                               gets a vision of a species that is not found in the                                                                                                       city’s records, he thinks that the city’s troubles and                                                                                                   this species might be linked.

                                                                                                     This film is a bit of an anomaly. It features the                                                                                                     best visual effects I’ve seen in years and is so full of creativity that I was loving it for almost a straight hour. There are so many moments of jaw-dropping beauty that just immerse you in this world that I would love to live in. But then, this film also features some of the worst writing in any big-budget film, and that’s saying something. Dane DeHaan is completely miscast as Agent Valerian, who is supposed to be this suave, James Bond-type character that Dane DeHaan just cannot emulate on any level. It doesn’t help, of course, that the script drags him even further down. There were so many moments where the audience was supposed to care about the characters in this film, but we just don’t because the dialogue doesn’t develop these characters at all. The plot itself is a little confusing and resorts to long exposition scenes where the villains or heroes explain everything that has just happened and what it means instead of showing us, the way a good script might in this kind of visual movie.

         The first hour of this film I absolutely loved. There wasn’t that much dialogue and the visual spectacle was on full creative overload. There is a scene in a club with Agent Valerian that pretty much signals the beginning of the end for the film’s quality. Everything just smalls on the brakes and slows down on both visual splendor and creativity. It was too bad, because I actually think that this film is worth seeing just for the visuals; if the rest of the film had been really great, this could have been a sci-fi classic. But the rest of the film is pretty terrible, especially in the second half. Dane DeHaan’s terrible performance combined with the film’s terrible script to produce a laughably bad second half that squanders the potential of the creativity on display.

Starring: Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne

Writer: Luc Besson