SPOILERS DOWN THE PATH; THE DISCUSSION BELOW WILL NOT BE COMPREHENSIVE WITHOUT IT.
TREAD CAREFULLY. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is an extraordinary effort on the indie front! To personally fund a magnum opus as such without any compromises on comparisons with studio-produced summer blockbusters is a rarity, therefore, hats off to Luc Besson for that!
The gravity of this motion picture is without a doubt, the spellbinding visuals! In an age where CGI bloated films are flooding the silver screens without real memorability, Luc Besson's comic-book based feature stands out tall! Each planet has its distinctive civilization, design, weapons, costumes and vehicles, with the Pearls tribe, their bedroom, using pearl as water, pearl-collection as occupation and coral themed houses in Planet Mül being the best creations of all! All the creature beings were modelled exceptionally! Da, Jellyfish, Bromosaurs, Omelites, Azin-Mo, Poulong farmers, Doghan-Daguis, K-TRON mecha-soldiers and the Mül converter were amazing! Some of the concepts and ideas, such as the brain chart, spaceship imitating outdoors, floating vehicles, butterflies as baits, hidden Big Market, vessel ship splitting into smaller ones, hacking an alien guard and erasing hologram existence were good. Yes, these may remind many of Star Wars and Avatar to name a few, but the film has its own share of uniqueness, admittedly. Sadly, the show is nothing more than just to boast the visual spectacle.
The movie began prodigiously. We are visually told how colonies were formed through the Alpha Space Station with varying ethnicities of human beings coming into one, and as years passed by, all sorts of aliens started to join as well. With the timely entry of the title card, one by one problem emerged. Once the beautiful and peaceful planet of the Pearls is introduced, chaos punctured holes in the sky, causing one of the members to die, thus raising the story's primary dramatic question. There were 2 reasons why this death sequence wasn't impactful at all. One, we knew nothing about this tribe in their few minutes of presence to us, hence we were offered nil to care about. Two, Alexandre Desplat's extremely underwhelming score! This is rather shocking coming from a genius musician. His odd, unimpressive, mismatching, sometimes contradictory choices of background music suppressed the tension each and every time hereon after!
It is at this point we arrive to the main issue of the script reflected on celluloid. Yes, the protagonist and his sidekick. Valerian (Dane DeHaan) is an astute agent who solves crimes in the galaxy, as with his partner Laureline (Cara Delevingne). These two characters are highly uninteresting! We gain no personal information on them, except that Valerian wants to marry Laureline to which she rejects time and time. He uses so much of dialogues to describe himself and yap on and on telling the obvious about his feelings to the girl he is working with! At first, it was okay. But, as soon as you realize this is actually delaying the real mission by a lot, you want them to quit talking about their private matters and get on with business immediately! This rendered the romance mediocre and their interactions dull, let alone the fall-flat humor. Since we have nothing to root for this pair of leads, whatever they do doesn't excite a bone in you. If you were to plot this film in the form of a graph, it would be a horizontal line. The tensions, thrills and suspense are all automatically gone, abandoning the action sequences to have any effect at all. Do you see the clear domino effect here, ladies and gentlemen?
Speaking of the action sequences, from the first task itself to the next ones we see, the screentime dwelled too long in it rather than showing the necessary juicy parts alone! The main mission is to find out what happened to the Pearls tribe and where's the kidnapped Commander, but the entire Act II was dedicated to each partner rescuing each other. This is not to say the sequences featuring Rihanna as the shapeshifter, dancing with constantly intriguing apparel changes and the food-testing festival for the emperor weren't captivating, but the question is, what value do these add to the overall proceedings? Why are we digressing from the story's spine now? We are supposed to be solving the mystery! This is exactly why the death of Bubble was cringeworthy and ineffective! Not only she was a redundant character, but these additional adventures were miles away from our intended goal! The adventures should have been embedded within the main storyline and streamlined towards meeting the one final destination, only then it would have been seamless and participative.
Talk about the mystery! Wait, was there one? The moment the Commander, played by Clive Owen denied Valerian's access to classified information, audiences already knew that the former was responsible in the Pearls' genocide. In a story, when audiences are ahead of the events and are waiting at the finish line for the runtime to arrive, you know the film is doomed for good. Since the filmmakers have noticed that they haven't focused on telling the story after depleting the entire Act II, the Third Act becomes a gigantic expositional hustle! Out of nowhere, Valerian mentions that he has a female voice leading him to the Pearls. And they relate the whole story from the beginning, again! What was the purpose of the earlier depictions in the picture then?! The Commander gets out of unconsciousness and drags on with his arguments. The audiences are waiting for the film to end already! Quit wasting time by narrating the obvious repeatedly! And the villain's motivation was generic and bland like in almost every other films we watch. No one knows why would he attempt to kill his own kind too. Structurally, the movie is wrong and should have had a more proper arrangement!
There's one particular episode everyone should keep their eyes open for, which is the 'shortcut' scene! The one long thread of journey across diverse environments and colonies was truly phenomenal! This was the film's best written sequence! Thierry Arbogast's camerawork was sound with precise framing. One of the match cut transition of shape was splendid. Ethan Hawke's role as Jolly the Pimp was entertaining. Cara's acting performance was subpar. Although the remaking of the Pearls' planet doesn't make sense, it's a gorgeous watch nevertheless. And the pair ending up on a beach as promised fits well to the closure.