Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – The Fifth Element’s distant cousin

‘Star Wars, Star Trek, Valerian.’ Spot the odd one out.  Well, apparently, all THREE are major players in the sci-fi world.  The problem is that only one of them is a major comic in France ONLY (and that’s ‘Valerian’ in case you wondered!).  Therefore, there weren’t that many people getting particularly excited when it was announced that it would be coming to the big screen, courtesy of visionary directly, Luc Besson.  Therefore, the only real piece of trivia to help promote its launch was ‘The most expensive French film ever made’ hardly set the pre-ticket sales at the Box Office alight.  And, subsequently, it didn’t really live up to its full potential.

Luc Besson was also the writer/director behind ‘The Fifth Element’ – a sci-fi film with a decent budget that only really did ‘okay-ish’ at the Box Office, before truly finding its place in cinema history throughout the years after its release.  It did a lot better on the small screen and eventually became quite a (profitable!) cult hit, now regarded as one of the best sci-fi films of the nineties.  I’m not saying that ‘Valerian’ is quite up there with ‘The Fifth Element,’ but I certainly enjoyed it more than its disappointing Box Office takings suggested.

First of all, the wonderfully-haunting song (‘Space Oddity’ by David Bowie) plays over a montage of shots showing humanity building a space station around Earth which went on to become a beacon of intergalactic trade for numerous species and, eventually, got so big that it had to be released into the cosmos forever.  Skip forward a few hundred years and we meet our two young peace-keepers-of-the-future, Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne) who are generally charged with the task of saving a peaceful race from ultimate destruction.  I won’t go into too much detail regarding the plot because it is pretty standard and there’s nothing really new there that hasn’t been done before.

What follows are just over two hours of beautiful, colouring settings which really do put the ‘Star Wars’ films to shame in terms of detail and imagination.  Of course much of the scenery and aliens are computer-generated, but it’s not as jarring as it could be and, once you get used to it, you really do feel these weird and wonderful creatures and places are there.  Plus there’s plenty of great futuristic tech on display to go with the –inevitable – action-related set-pieces – my personal favourite being a market in another dimension that you can only see wearing special glasses (it’s also a tourist hot-spot of the future!).

So, ‘Valerian’ does a lot right.  However, what may go some way to let it down is ‘Valerian’ himself, i.e. Dane DeHaan.  I’ve seen him in other films and he’s a good actor, sadly here he just doesn’t seem to cut it as a believable action hero/leading man.  I don’t know whether he just struggled acting against so much CGI, but all I could focus on was having the saviour of the galaxy and the bags under his eyes!  I know some people slate Cara for her acting ability, but I found her far more believable as a ‘space cop’ and almost wished she was the sole hero the film was based on.  The plot also wanders here and there and you feel like there are a few ‘sub-plots’ which don’t really go anywhere and probably could have been removed.

However, the film overall was great fun and if you’re looking for a beautiful space opera with plenty of neat tricks and action, you’ll get what you’re looking for here.  Hopefully, like Earth’s long-lost space station itself, this will eventually find its place in the universe.  Guess we’ll probably never get the sequel that could have been based on its comic-roots.

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that