Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
(2017)
(SPOILERS) In the aftermath of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planet’s floundering US debut (unlike
The Fifth Element, it seems doubtful
that an international bonanza will compensate) and (mostly) critical mauling,
there have been numerous post-mortems, ranging from the reasonable to the
desperately lazy (audiences didn’t know the property; it wasn’t a sequel; it
didn’t have stars; it had a weird title – none of which are an issue when
something is a hit, Baby Driver, for
example). Valerian was one of my most
anticipated pictures of the year, in spite of what was evidently – as much as
trailers provide evidence – dubious lead casting, on the basis that The Fifth Element is a profoundly
wonderful, idiosyncratic science fiction movie, shot through with giddy Gallic
humour, and this was Luc Besson returning to that genre. And it does have profoundly wonderful, idiosyncratic
and giddy Gallic moments. As such, it’s much more interesting than most homogenous
Hollywood product. Its fatal flaw, even more so than the charisma deficit of
the principals, is one the director is usually on pretty solid ground with:
pace.
Because Valerian
barely musters any, even during its nominal actions sequences. It comes
equipped with spectacle by the shedload, but Besson seems actively
disinterested in maintaining a narrative through line or anything to keep his
audience on the hook. There’s a mystery to solve, but when he’s not going off
at tangents, such that you wonder if there’s any point to what you’re seeing,
he’s labouring the explanations; Clive Owen is obviously a bad guy from the
moment we set eyes on him (and five minutes after that he’s torturing one of
the impossibly angelic alien race whose planet he decimated, just to make it
abundantly clear), and there seems to be a need for Valerian and Laureline to
explain who did what and why at least several times in case you didn’t get it,
or weren’t paying attention. Or had nodded off (someone I attended the
screening with did exactly that, but unfortunately missed both explanations).
Besson has been a master of ratchetting up the tension in
the past (Nikita, Leon), and even the more recent and underrated
The Family has that kind of flair going
for it. Here, elements you suspect might be McGuffins (the converter) are put
in Laureline’s pocket and forgotten about until needed, rather than, say,
stolen and pursued until the vital moment they called upon to engineer the
climax. The villain is incapacitated for much of the running time, and when his
(very cool-y designed) robot soldiers are finally utilised, Valerian disposes
of them in dismayingly easy fashion. If Besson always has a keen visual sense
(one of the best), his storytelling nouse is thoroughly dislocated this time,
odd for someone whose production house has made a hallmark of linear,
stripped-down action movie models.
The consequence of this, particularly as there’s little entertainment
value in kicking about with the leads, is that the picture relies almost
entirely on vignettes or asides to maintain interest. As such, it starts off quite
beautifully with the kind of visual and aural accompaniment you’d expect from The Fifth Element director, 20 years on;
the development of the central space station Alpha is charted over the course
of eight centuries to the soundtrack of Space
Oddity (seriously, for such an over-used – but ever-brilliant – song,
Besson makes it fresh again). It’s funny, clever, spry and deceptively simple.
And then the picture proper starts.
But the establishing sequence, as Valerian and Laureline,
mystifyingly experienced police special agents, intercept a black-market deal
selling a converter (a cute little creature that replicates anything it ingests,
including reproducing a planetary expanse at the climax), may lack breathless
thrills or tension, but it is
consistently visually intriguing, juggling as it does two simultaneous
dimensional realities that Valerian must navigate his way through, particularly
problematic when his hand is trapped in the more dangerous one. Indeed,
Besson’s fluid sense of the “real” is one of the more engaging but undeveloped
parts of the Valerian, playing with notions
of holographic universes that run the gamut of dream states, actual events, and
3D-printed matter issuing forth from the coat of said snuffle creature.
There are other moments, such as Valerian crashing through a
succession of alien zones in the station, that find Besson galvanised in terms
of the mostly listless pace, and the countdown ending is reasonably effective,
but in the main it’s with whacky Besson that the golden nuggets are to be
found. In The Fifth Element, he assembled
leads who were sympathetic to such shenanigans, but here there’s no such luck.
Owen doesn’t seem remotely in tune with the picture in any way that makes him a
remotely appealing or memorable antagonist (Gary Oldman may loathe The Fifth Element, but his loony turn is
one of its highlights).
Dane DeHaan, a decent actor when cast well (some have cited
his vocal similarities here to Keanu Reeves, the takeaway being that they are very
different thesps who both clearly need sympathetic casting), be it in Chronicle or Life, is completely out of his depth when asked to play cocky,
heroic, flippant, confident, playful and macho. There’s no point where you
believe he’s one of the premier galactic agents around, and one can only reel
at Besson’s choice.
If he picked DeHaan and Cara Delevingne to make everything
else “pop”, well, that kind of
worked, I guess, but why you’d be comfortable with a void at the centre of your
movie is beyond me. Every time they fling romantic barbs/deflections at each
other (I’m guessing a Han-Leia vibe is being aimed for), the picture assumes a
state of abject lifelessness. They have no chemistry and inspire no desire to
accompany them on their mission. I’m loathe to compare this to the Wachowski
sisters’ Jupiter Ascending, as Valerian at least maintains a sense of
fun amid the stodge, but both go fundamentally wrong in picking performers who
disappear into the material, never to be seen again.
Develingne fares better than DeHaan, such that when Valerian
absents himself for a stretch and Laureline embarks to find him, you entirely
don’t miss him (added to which, there’s never a point where you have the
remotest idea what she sees in him, or even what kind of relationship they’re
supposed to have – the marriage proposal looks like a joke, until it isn’t, and
even then, you’re left waiting for the punchline). But she still ends up
impassive much of the time and lacks a discernible sense of humour – she ought
to have one, with those eyebrows – so the scene where she sticks her head in a
jellyfish’s bottom is never quite as amusing as it ought to be.
I’m a big fan of Europudding casting (see The Adventures of Gerard for a tip-top
example), where stylistically mismatched performers of various nations are
thrown at each other on screen, but you tend to need big performances to make
that kind of thing work, and here Besson is too often in error (Ethan Hawke,
really?), or wastes an opportunity (we see Rutger Hauer for about a minute,
which is a crime). As a consequence, you remember smaller parts, such as Eric
Lampaert’s guide Thaziit (camping it up like Russell Brand back on drugs) or
Bob the Pirate (Alain Chabat), appearing popping a champagne cork, or the
Howard the Duck-like (that’s the ‘80s movie version) trio of Doghan-Dagui, like
diminutive Ferengi only endearing.
There’s also a rather wonderful sequence, illustrative of
Besson at his lunatic best, in which Laureline is captured by the Boulan Bathor
and required to try on various dresses before being taken before their emperor
to “serve” dinner. The emperor has been studiously showing his distaste for the
endless procession of menu choices, but Laureline arrives wearing a ridiculous,
monstrously-brimmed hat (so large, it reminded me of a sequence in The Adventures of Gerard in which the
base of Jack Hawkin’s dinner table is one of his men with his head poking
through a hole in the middle) with the top of her head displayed so as to be
nicely snipped off. It’s the kind of thing twisted idea that brings out the
best in Besson (the ensuing fight, in which Valerian dispatches numerous Boulan
Bathor, including the emperor, is appropriately unrestrained).
I was a fan of the juxtaposition of almost childlike
sincerity and utmost goofiness in The
Fifth Element, but it doesn’t really land in Valerian, even though there are strong echoes. In both movies,
there is a proclamation from the female protagonist that love conquers all
(which is when you find out, in this one, that apparently, the male protagonist
goes strictly by the book, all evidence previously to the contrary), and in
both, an alien singer is sacrificed on the journey to that realisation. Rhianna
has an enjoyable, show-stopping cabaret number as shape-shifting Bubble,
although the Bubble sequences are the most fun when she’s impersonating one of
the Boulan Bathor.
Thematically, though, you’d have to be pretty dense to
escape the message in The Fifth Element.
In Valerian, there’s little in the
way of takeaway. The Mül-ians are nature-lovin’ willowy types straight out of Avatar, only a touch less boss-eyed and
a whole lot less blue, so naturally they’re due the restoration of their realm;
the ever-variable Alexandre Desplat really lays on the treacly score in this
regard, so as to let you know just how serenely heart-breaking their beatific
existence is/was.
Design-wise, well the costumes are every bit as good as The Fifth Element’s if not quite as
outrageous as you’d get from Jean-Paul Gautier, and the CGI creature work is varied,
impressive, and often amusing, albeit you’re constantly wistful for the
tangible prosthetics and animatronics of his earlier SF feast. A marriage of the
two would have been preferable.
I doubt Valerian and
the City of a Thousand Planets will be the undoing of Besson or EuropaCorp,
and I’m sure the “auteur hack”
(whatever that is), as a typically hacky Guardian piece labelled him, will be
moving on to other pictures before long. Another article in the same rag labelled him “the unsung hero of world cinema”, before
dismissing his entire output as “part
brilliant, part terrible” (cherry picking like that, you could level the
same charge at Coppola, but no one would argue his ‘70s work isn’t that of the
bona fide auteur). It’s a shame though, that this picture sags the way it does;
a re-edit might solve some of the problems, but, alas, nothing can change the
leads.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.
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