Like much of Luc Besson’s work, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is part brilliant and part terrible. Terrible because Cara Delevingne can’t really act, and Dane DeHaan, who supposedly can, doesn’t. There’s also the clunky dialogue, confusing detours and cheesy sentimentality.
But Valerian is also generous in its futuristic sci-fi wonders. It floods the screen with colourful exotica: dozens of alien species; a virtual-reality shopping mall; mind-reading jellyfish; Rihanna as a shape-shifting cabaret dancer; a totally random Herbie Hancock cameo … Besson throws everything into it. He even threw in his own salary when the budget crept up to $180m, making it the most expensive movie ever made by a non-American studio. If it doesn’t pay off internationally, his EuropaCorp studios could be in trouble: it reported a $136m loss this year.
Looking back, his entire output could be described as “part brilliant, part terrible”. He’s had his triumphs: The Fifth Element (to which Valerian is practically a sequel), Subway, Léon, La Femme Nikita and the Scarlett Johansson thriller Lucy. And he’s had his disasters: Angel-A, Robert de Niro “comedy” The Family, Aung San Suu Kyi biopic The Lady – Besson doing Burmese politics felt about as natural as Ken Loach making a Transformers sequel.
Self-taught and unashamedly lowbrow, Bresson gets the worst of both worlds. He’s looked down on by French cinema for being too Hollywood, and yet he’s never actually worked there. Instead, he’s built the European alternative. He was the driving force behind Paris’s vast Cité du Cinema studio complex, and EuropaCorp is one of the biggest film companies in Europe. Admittedly, they churn out a lot of crap. The reason they’re in dire straits commercially might have something to do with recent misfires such as Kevin Spacey cat comedy Nine Lives.
But Besson launched the careers of Natalie Portman and Jean Reno. He’s made franchise-friendly heroes of Liam Neeson (Taken) and Jason Statham (The Transporter), and EuropaCorp has supported foreigners, including Gary Oldman (Nil by Mouth), Tommy Lee Jones (Three Burials) and, currently, Thomas Vinterberg (Kursk).
You’ve got to admire him for risking it all to make an exuberantly bonkers comic-book movie. There’s no indication it will pay off this time: in its first week, Valerian took a meagre $17m in the US. But personally, I hope it does. For all his flaws, cinema is a more interesting place with Besson in it.
Valerian is in cinemas on 2 August
