The summer movie season is a mess of big-budget blockbusters, and this particular one is especially dispiriting: one existing property after another, wringing the last few cents out of their franchises as they assault your senses. Here's how much we rely on things we're already familiar with: there is a movie coming out next week starring the smiley or vomity faces you put in text messages. Give me something new, I cry. Show me something I haven't seen three times already!
Well, be careful what you wish for. I saw Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets the other night, and my soul just tendered its letter of resignation. I have been dazzled to death, entertained to the brink of epilepsy, and I think I might have accidentally gotten Lasik.
Valerian—which actually is based on an existing property, a French comic series from the 1970s which I haven't read and neither have you—begins on Space Station Alpha. Alpha has been built to accommodate Earthlings of all races and nationalities, because Earth itself has gotten too crowded. And as we move into the future, Alpha opens its space doors all sorts of aliens and monsters and weirdos from the cantina scene in Star Wars, until it gets too big and has to be cut off from Earth and sent into the darkest depths of the universe. Breitbart is already hard at work on the "Valerian as immigration-reform allegory" think piece, don't you worry.
Next, we're on a planet called Mül, a space paradise whose inhabitants are a race of Sasha Velours doing a Na'vi Realness Maxi-Challenge. They get along, they sparkle, they sashay and shantay. Mül is full of space pearls, which the natives bathe in, and when they run low and need more of them, they "give back to nature what nature has given to us." Here's what that means, and I am not kidding: They feed space pearls to their pets—little orange alligator-armadillo hybrids—and then the pets literally sweat and shit out more space pearls. And everyone rejoices. So, 10 minutes into this film: intense, joyful CGI scat play.
The fantastic planet of Mül loses the lip-sync and gets destroyed pretty much immediately, so then it's up to our hero children Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne to…do something. After two and a half hours in a theater and a few days afterwards to reflect, I'm still not exactly sure what that is.
What I do know is that this movie is so constantly visually stunning that it actually makes you tired and a tiny bit nauseated. It spends its whole running time literally running, speeding into and out of dazzling computer-generated worlds, soaring and plummeting through colorful 3D starscapes and future virtual shopping malls. If you are allowed to breathe for one second, don't get too comfortable, because boing!, here comes some broad comic relief: an over-caffeinated Ethan Hawke as a Jolly the Space Pimp, or British comic Eric Lampaert as Thaziit, your very eager guide to the inter-dimensional space market. (Seriously, we spend about an hour in this place that sort of doesn't exist, but also sort of does, where you can buy virtual things that then become real things, and also virtual creatures can kill the virtual you, but then the real you also dies even though the thing that killed you and the you that it killed aren't real. 700 years from now, things are complicated, irritating, and French.)
Cara Delevingne glowers, Dane DeHaan continues to look like someone who's going to be handsome, and Rihanna drops by for five minutes to play a shapeshifting space hooker named Bubble. Bubble is dispatched in a way that can only be described as "sub-Poochie": she helps our heroes escape from a creature that wants to eat Cara Delevingne's head, and then literally says: "Oh, I must have gotten injured back there," and dies. She never gets to sing, but the subtext of her performance rings loud and clear: "Bitch better have my money."
We should also address the Space Jews. A few times throughout the film, when a character needs to make sense of the story, three comic-relief characters show up. They are short and dark, their noses are long and bent, they have information that they will give you— at a price! Let's work out a deal!— and everyone hates them. It is possible that Luc Besson, being French, may not be aware of the casual anti-Semitism, but I can tell you from experience: New York is.
I saw this movie in a screening where the back half of the theater was press and the front half was radio contest winners, and there was laughter throughout. The fans laughed at the jokes and the critters and the Space Jews, the critics laughed at the serious dialogue. There was never a dull moment. Do with that information what you will.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to sit in a silent, dark room for a few hours. I need a dull moment.
