21 Jul Valerian And The city Of A Thousand PLanets Analyis

VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS

[UPDATED REVIEW – 6 April 6, 2019]

This movie is still trash, except for its opening montage of the evolution of the space station. Other than that, it’s generally accepted that this movie is terrible, and sunk the studio that paid for it. My feelings have only become stronger negative, despite not re-watching it again.

Overall opinion: You can do better (that’s advice for viewers and filmmakers alike).

[ORIGINAL REVIEW – 4 August 2017]

Valerian is a beautiful mess, which is a step-up from my expectation of it being a beautiful dumpster fire. I don’t even feel compelled to write a whole lot because the movie really isn’t worth that much more of my time.

Here’s the good:

Valerian is visually spectacular and is (visually) a great spiritual successor to director Luc Besson’s prior classic, The Fifth Element. It is beautiful, imaginative, and does a great job of world-building. The opening of the movie does a fantastic job of showing how the ‘city of a thousand planets’ came about.

Actress Cara Delevingne gives a great, wink-wink performance that acknowledges the fundamental silliness of the entire concept, while also doing virtually all of the heavy lifting performance-wise as one of the two leads in the movie (at least on the written page; in reality, she was the only lead).
I will say that my perception was heavily influenced by her less-than-stellar performance in Suicide Squad, the handicap I assume when a supermodel decides to be an actress, and the unbelievably awful performance of her co-lead, Dane DeHaan. I say her performance was great, but that was not the cream rising to the top so much as the best apple at the bottom of the barrel.

Also, the movie was genuinely fun at times. I was pleasantly surprised, and that’s saying something. But that’s far from it being a great movie.

Now…there was some really awful thing about the movie, and I’m going to try to get through them quickly.

First, the movie is way too long. At 2.5 hours, it was pressing its luck at keeping my attention given the ridiculously simple plot. In my opinion, it could have been cut by 30-40 minutes. This would have been very easy to do and would have resulted in a more story-appropriate runtime and, quite possibly, a genuinely great movie, which I’m convinced is buried in this movie somewhere.

The villain of the movie, Clive Owen, is given away from the instant you see his sour facial expression. The movie pretends like nobody knows he’s the bad guy, and there’s even a flashback scene that insultingly gives the audience this “big reveal”, but at no point AT ALL was there any doubt that he was the villain. This completely undermined the movie’s dramatic tension.

As mentioned, Dane DeHaan is wretched as Valerian. I’ve seen him in other movies and he’s a fine actor, but I think that his work in Valerian suffered for a couple reasons. First, I think the role was meant to be a Han Solo-type character; fun, charismatic, handsome swashbuckler. This is just a stretch for DeHaan (apparently) and his performance was muddled and unfocused. I also attribute this to a very poor script, full of awful dialogue. I would say more, but the rest of the reasons I think his performance suffered are firmly rooted in the last thing I hated about this movie, which was…

The undercurrent of sexism and misogyny that are infused in all of Besson’s films.

Luc Besson is one of France’s most famous and successful filmmakers. His films also have a disturbing trend of treating women as lesser in virtually every way. Even his films with strong female protagonists manage to undermine their independence with some character traits and narrative elements that range from sexist to misogynistic.
For example, Leon: The Professional is undermined when he decided that a possible romantic relationship should be explored between the titular 50-ish year old character and the 10-year-old Natalie Portman. Although these scenes were limited to non-US versions of the film (and maybe I’m legitimizing that decision right now), they added an element that was uncomfortable narratively as well as from a meta-filmmaking perspective.
Kiss of the Dragon was the first movie I noticed this trend, in which every female character is a prostitute with no redeeming qualities other than being a constant damsel in distress, and is that really a quality we need more of in any movie?
Lucy featured Scarlett Johansson as a below-average-intelligence woman who is turned into a super-genius with a range of omniscient skillset. Although the movie was actually pretty good, the movie tried REALLY hard to remind the audience that Lucy is vulnerable by focusing on her degrading treatment by her captors and her status as a drug-mule.
Which leads me to Valerian. Throughout the movie, the main subplot revolves around main character Valerian trying to convince his LEO-partner, Lauraline, to marry him. The problem is that Valerian has absolutely no redeeming qualities, and, in fact, the film goes to great lengths to emphasize this as profoundly as possible. Every 20 minutes, the film takes a break for Valerian to literally harass Laureline about marrying him. This is a character who keeps a “playlist” of holographic images of every sexual exploit in his life. He is also completely incapable of treating Laureline with any respect for her professional expertise, let alone her status as a woman. Valerian is a true shitbag, and it was impossible for me to empathize with him in any way.
This was particularly notable and most pronounced about halfway through the movie when Valerian needs to get through a door in disguise. Thus begins a 20-minute aside where he seeks out an alien that can disguise him and get him through the door. But the way this was done was simply insulting. He basically hunts down an alien stripper (played by Riahnna) who can shape-shift into anything and convinces her to help him. After making it clear that she is a sex-slave. And Valerian in no way acknowledges that he should help HER for this reason alone. And he enjoys a 3-to-4-minute striptease (while on a mission to rescue Laureline, no less, who is in imminent danger) and clearly enjoys every second of it. Then he tricks her into helping him, after which she is immediately killed, reminding the audience that she was nothing more than a narrative device. The entire episode within the movie was both narratively sexist and, from a meta-filmmaking perspective, disturbingly typical of Besson’s treatment of female characters.
And in the end, it all boiled down to “How do we get Valerian through the door?”
Instead, it was a salacious scene that within the context of the narrative and the context of the filmmaker’s process degraded the female characters and legitimized Valerian as a real scumbag.
The entire movie was filled with small-to-medium references that promoted this underlying philosophy of sexism. In this day-and-age, it just feels lazy and a leftover of a bygone era.
I actually find a great counter-point in the animated Archer TV show, in which the main character, Archer, bears all the traits they seemed to want in Valerian, but failed to accomplish what the creators of Archer manage with ease: Archer is a sexist bastard, but he’s incredibly likable and he’s surrounded by female characters who cut him down to size and constantly upstage him with their various skills and abilities. There is an equality to the flawed characters, which makes the entire scenario bearable and even enjoyable. Valerian is simply a one-sided constant flow of unpleasant sexist commentary and character traits.
And all of this not only made Laureline a far more sympathetic character, but far more impressive since the events of the movie, which span a few days at most, demonstrate that she can stay on task and be a legitimate hero, while Valerian couldn’t go 15 minutes without bringing up his ridiculous (ridiculously lame) marriage proposal to Laureline. There was nothing about him that was heroic aside from practical tradecraft; which, as a side note, was a little hard to believe since DeHaan and Delevingne are really young. I have no idea how people that young become the greatest secret agents in the known universe. But there you have it.

As I said, the movie was better than expected, but left a really bad impression about Besson’s opinion of women. I enjoyed Delevingne, who is, in fact, gorgeous, but also turned in a great performance despite everything going against her–she is the real hero of the movie. The best 10-minutes of the movie was her frantic rescue of Valerian, which was immediately deflated by his douchey reaction to her rescue. It was representative of the entire film’s effect.

Analysis by Jim Washburn