Visually, French director Luc Besson's "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" is tres magnifique. When it comes to the story, the film is what Pepe Le Pew would call a "le cinema avec grand stinker."
As has been Besson's cinematic modus operandi over the years, the director can paint film pictures that waiver between breathtaking and awe inspiring. The worlds he creates come to life with his embrace of bold textures, the brave use of color and a sense of grandeur where big is too small and huge is still not large enough.
That's the world Besson has created in transferring the comic book series "Valerian and Laureline" by Jean-Claude Mezieres and Pierre Christin to the large screen. Suggesting that the floating city in space (the end result of centuries of growth spawned by the International Space Station) is filled with all known creatures in the universe isn't just hype but a promise of visual diversity that seems boundless.
Besson's ability to take what amounts to space garbage and give it such an organic feel that it comes across as a living, breathing part of the story is reason enough to see "Valerian." That's a blessing as the story is fractured and hackneyed, presented by the director in tones ranging from epic to idiotic. His direction is so uneven, Besson even resorts to a scene where after one character gets hit on the head, she crosses her eyes and falls over. That was a pitiful attempt at humor back when the Three Stooges used it.
It's a complicated task trying to explain the story because Besson often gets distracted and heads off into areas that are so meaningless to the story that they bring it to a grinding halt. He starts with a tale of genocide that quickly turns into a buddy cop movie with the universe's best law enforcers, Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne) heading out on a mission to retrieve a vital piece of evidence.
When the heroes aren't bickering like the old married couple Valerian would love them to be, they are running through an amazing world where multiple dimensions have come together. This soon gives way to some type of threat to the floating city that must be stopped. There's a very tedious thread holding these elements together that begins to unravel with any tug of logic.
Besson then loses his writing way completely and the threat that could wipe out millions is put on hold while he heads off to a pair of secondary stories about Valerian and Laureline having to be saved. Both are pointless, and the events surrounding Valerian come across as being as alien to the main story as any inhabitant on the floating city.
Valerian needs a quick disguise, but to get it he must sit through a lightning quick dance number by a gelatinous glob known as Bubble (Rihanna). The visuals here through are stunning and make for a great music video. But as part of the film, they are nothing more than a story blockade that takes ages to penetrate. And even then, the story stays in a stall, as there's the whole rescue of Laureline.
As if bored and ready to wrap up the mess, Besson wanders back to what passes as the main story, which is weighed down by more spouting of the virtues of peace and love than a San Francisco love-in in the '60s and the typical villain who represents how with great power comes great treachery and deceit.
All of this is told through the film's two young stars. At first glance both don't look old enough to be able to drive a car let alone pilot a spacecraft. And they look years younger than the space-saving couple in the comics. But dismissing a hero because of his or her youth died a long time ago and has continued from "Star Wars" to "The Hunger Games."
Delevingne brings some solid spunk to her performance, but it's a distraction that DeHaan sounds like the younger brother of Keanu Reeves. It's a little hard to respect someone in command when the next sentence out of his mouth could be: "Party on, dudes!"
Of course, both had to contend with Besson's cut-and-paste script that is so flawed. This is often the problem when the same person writes and directs a movie. The Wachowskis found out with "Jupiter Ascending" and Chris Weitz learned with "The Golden Compass" that taking on both crucial roles eliminates another voice, and that can be deadly. "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" could have been just as badly written by someone else, but at least there would be more potential for debate over weird decisions like how a key creature has the ability to massively poop duplicates of anything it eats. It feels like it ate one page of the "Valerian" script.
"Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" would be a perfect coffee table book. A massive tome of drawings and pictures would provide hours of entertainment. The script, even printed on a one-page pamphlet, would be mostly blank.
