Valerian and the City of a Thousand FX Shots.

You have to almost feel sorry for Luc Besson. He directed two of my favourite movies; Leon, a random little thriller about an assassin, his plant and an orphan and one of the best loved and unique Sci Fi movies in recent memory in The Fifth Element. The intervening years haven't been too kind though; he hasn't really managed to come close to those heights let alone topping them. Lucy was the probably the most recognisable thing he's done and I think we all know how I felt about that (if not then check it out in all its withering glory here... https://angerinamansuit.blogspot.com/2017/03/any-which-way-but-lucy.html). Where Fifth Element was a visually and narratively quirky affair with a nice mix of humour and action and arguably one of the best bad guys in the last few decades of Sci Fi, Lucy on the other hand was a loosely cobbled together series of increasingly frustrating and disappointing action scenes which tended to actually lack much action. Call me a stickler for tradition, but I like my movies to have more action than the trailers, not less. Anyway, I digress.

Valerian got a lot of people talking right off the bat, proclaiming this to be the long awaited spiritual sequel to Fifth Element. I've never understood this odd clamouring people have for the rehashing even the best of movies. You want more Fifth Element? Go buy the DVD and you can re-watch it until your eyeballs dry out and leave you fumbling for the remote like a mole rat who's suddenly found himself on a beach holiday in Marbella. It's also adapted from a 60s French comic book which is not only so psychedelic you need to read it wearing rubber gloves so you don't get a contact high but also seemingly hugely influential on Sci Fi in general. So already the pressure was on to perform and obviously you'll be wondering whether or not it did.

Yeah, I'm gonna go with a nope on that one. Well sort of.

It is, in all honesty, very easy on the eye. You can fill in your own superlatives here if you like; sumptuous, dazzling, eye-popping;whatever you feel would fit best on the front cover of the DVD followed by some stars and the name of the random website or tabloid paper that's been paid to say nice things about the movie. The problem is that the first 10 or 15 minutes may as well just be part of an animated feature. I assume there might have been some human input past typing in code, probably in the form of a parade of gangly stuntmen in catsuits covered in ping pong balls prancing about a warehouse wondering how their lives came to this. It's difficult to not compare it to Fifth Element although it's not entirely fair; both movies are about aliens to an extent but really they are entirely different entities. 20 years have passed between the two movies and the changes are easy to spot; practical effects have unsurprisingly given way to digital and like so many modern movies I think it suffers because of it. On the one hand, there's no way you could do half of this stuff with wire-work, miniatures and latex puppets but on the other hand it all feels a bit soulless. You have to get it right and that takes more than just a deft hand with a graphics tab and a bank of computers that cost the same as the GDP of a moderately sized country. 

There is a much more pressing problem at large here though; the characterisation is just kind of... crap. A big part of the charm of both Leon and Korben Dallas is that they don't operate within the norm but they're basically still decent people with fine moral standards. I mean actually they're both vicious murdering bastards, but you kind of forget that. Valerian is almost the polar opposite; he's demonstrably an amoral prick who only seems to do his heroic bit because he's paid to do it. It's hard to work out where he's coming from though; he has a "playlist" of girls which would appear to be the future equivalent of a little black book but then moments later out of the blue he's professing his love for his partner and asking him to marry her before proceeding to harangue her at every possible opportunity before she finally succumbs at the end and everyone celebrates another victory for the Rick Deckard School of Forced Sci Fi Romantic Overtures. It sucks because apparently the comic was very much the opposite, with Laureline saving Valerian from his own stupidity and therefore vicariously the universe on a regular basis. She does start out that way, but slowly and surely devolves into a damsel in distress. Disappointing.

Thematically you've probably seen this before; it's a bit like Avatar in places, big blue primitive aliens have their world blown up by humans and somehow manage to float through space, learn all science ever and then hide for 30 years on the international space station which has mutated and grown into a sort of intergalactic hippie commune. Valerian is half possessed by the soul of the Empress' daughter and everyone's after a mini aardvark looking thing that can create absolutely any substance it likes when it eats a magic pearl. LSD is a hell of a drug kids. It's actually not very complicated but you still get plot exposition spoon-fed to you by clumsy dialogue and patronising narration frequently enough that it's annoying. All's well that ends well at the end, the bad guy gets his comeuppance, Valerian gets the girl and the aliens get to go home or whatever beach they feel like settling on (hopefully devoid of mole rats) but it's not really satisfying. What's really baffling is the laundry list of stars who get about 10 minutes of screen time between them: blink and you'll miss Rutger Hauer, Ethan Hawke obviously owes somebody money or a favour, Rhianna spends most of her time as a kind of squid person, and Clive Owen spends most of his time as a P.O.W. I guess that's what you get when 90% of your budget goes on green screens and RAM.

I don't know where it went wrong: Leon and Fifth Element were both clever and poignant whilst still managing to be action packed, but Besson's recent stuff is just not, (any of those things in fact). It might not have been a flop exactly, but Valerian didn't set the world on fire which is why I'm a touch surprised there are plans for a sequel (aren't there always? If Suicide Squad can get one, they must just be handing  them out). It was better than Avatar though, but then so is Polio.