I saw Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets yesterday and I liked it in spite of not liking the two leads. When the production credits segued into the beginning prologue to Bowie's Space Oddity, I got chills and sang.
My brother and I were the only people in the theater which means it's probably a box office bomb and no sequels will be made, but I enjoyed being able to talk and point out details. I've honestly not read the source material, but I've had the translated graphic novel collections (all probably incomplete and edited unfortunately) sitting on my Amazon account for years now, but I've honestly not bought anything on Amazon in over a year because I don't have a steady income so I can't compare it, but I will say that they should have cast leads that didn't feel like twentysomethings playing young adult teenage protagonists. It was jarring.
These are shallow complaints honestly, but Dane DeHaan ladies man status seemed informed than shown. Cara Delevingne came off better than in Suicide Squad, but I still don't like her as an actress and honestly would have preferred Rihanna with an age appropriate male lead. Scarlet Johansson with her Avengers look would have looked accurate to Laureline in the comics, but that's nitpicky and none of us really want to see her keep getting roles anyway after that Ghost In The Shell debacle.
What I liked about the film is that it proves you can do a space opera with tons of nonhuman aliens that isn't Star Wars. A lot of comparisons will be drawn to Star Wars and Fifth Element, which the director lifted a lot of design elements from the original comics. To get it out of the way yes the original Valerian and Laureline comics predate Star Wars so their ship resembling the Millennium Falcon is the source material and changing it to modernize it, or kill comparisons is sort of inauthentic. I like that they kept a lot of the retro feeling that probably is in the source material instead of foregoing it for bland apple sleek futurism, or whatever is in for portraying the future now. The sprawling cities made up in the satellite not only remind me of Fifth element, they remind me of paintings of Trantor from Isaac Asimov's Foundation books. That's a good thing because I fear that if Foundation ever got adapted we're stuck with modern sleek with no definitions. Everything looks lived in Valerian, most set designs for the future, or the past don't. They looked pasted on and sparse.
The plot isn't anything amazing, or world bending, but it's the adventure that I liked and it teaches a moral lesson of foregoing protocol when an injustice is made. When the bad guy of the film says he's a soldier and will take genocide over humiliation, (paraphrasing, I know i have some words off) you wanted him to get it.
Another thing I liked that will bother people is the nineties style writing and dialogue. It was refreshing. I watch a lot of films from my childhood that would now be called out for bad writing because people have earnest emotions and say what they mean and then ridiculous stuff happens that escalates, or fixes a sticky situation and they don't break the fourth wall and turn snarky over it. If Cara Delevingne rolled her eyes less like a poor man's Emma Stone, or Dane DeHaan did more than ape Keanu Reeves's speech patterns it would have felt more classic.
Of course there's probably a lot of things people especially on tumblr would have a discourse over, like Valerian housing a woman's soul. I as a transmale didn't find it offensive, but it's not for me to say how a transwoman would feel about that. Things relating to the body and mind become a tricky (hate that fucking word) or, problematic in sci-fi fantasy when you factor that in. It's why I see Ready Player One failing with it's avatar controversies in an age of social media dictating that you answer for your identity on a constant basis. Rihanna's character will definitely bother people. Herbie Hancock doesn't get enough to do. The relationship between Valerian and Laureline will bother people too among other things I can think of.
Anyway, I don't regret seeing this movie and will probably own it if I see it discounted. I would like for some sequels to happen, but it's not going to happen because we can't have cool things. I wish we could have more space opera's that aren't Star Wars, Star Trek, or Marvel. I think this movie does way better than what a lot of people complained about Jupiter Ascending lacked. It's just a shame it isn't perfect enough to garner another chance and we probably won't see another space opera property outside of the big three for another decade, or more because of diminishing returns and then we're back to lazy post-apocalypse, tired teenage dystopias, boring cyberpunk and isolation, stuck in a spaceship survivor genres.
By the way I saw the preview for A Wrinkle In Time and and I know people are going to hide their racism behind unnecessary creative liberties arguments. Unnecessary creative liberties would be aging up Jonas four years in The Giver so he can have hormonal teenage angst and making it in color because people can't sit through the art direction of Schindler's List and Sin City, so his seeing color loses meaning, or how it had to be scored because people need to be bombarded with sounds constantly instead of daring to see a cinematic experience that could challenge you, or make you feel unsettled.
Meg was cast to look thirteen as the books. That's promising. So all the complaints about how Oprah shouldn't materialize and be a shining light with a disembodied voice is a nitpick. That's a necessary change because I've long learned that masking named actors backfires. That's why all superheroes barely wear their masks if they have them at all. It was wasteful of Star Wars to waste Lupita Nyong'o as a voice under motion capture, at that point anyone can do the role. Valerian at least showed us Bubble's two forms, Rihanna and blue squishy alien. I think about the fact that Julia Roberts in Hook had to have a lot of closeups to justify her being Tinker Bell because she'd otherwise be a glowing silent light.
My brother and I were the only people in the theater which means it's probably a box office bomb and no sequels will be made, but I enjoyed being able to talk and point out details. I've honestly not read the source material, but I've had the translated graphic novel collections (all probably incomplete and edited unfortunately) sitting on my Amazon account for years now, but I've honestly not bought anything on Amazon in over a year because I don't have a steady income so I can't compare it, but I will say that they should have cast leads that didn't feel like twentysomethings playing young adult teenage protagonists. It was jarring.
These are shallow complaints honestly, but Dane DeHaan ladies man status seemed informed than shown. Cara Delevingne came off better than in Suicide Squad, but I still don't like her as an actress and honestly would have preferred Rihanna with an age appropriate male lead. Scarlet Johansson with her Avengers look would have looked accurate to Laureline in the comics, but that's nitpicky and none of us really want to see her keep getting roles anyway after that Ghost In The Shell debacle.
What I liked about the film is that it proves you can do a space opera with tons of nonhuman aliens that isn't Star Wars. A lot of comparisons will be drawn to Star Wars and Fifth Element, which the director lifted a lot of design elements from the original comics. To get it out of the way yes the original Valerian and Laureline comics predate Star Wars so their ship resembling the Millennium Falcon is the source material and changing it to modernize it, or kill comparisons is sort of inauthentic. I like that they kept a lot of the retro feeling that probably is in the source material instead of foregoing it for bland apple sleek futurism, or whatever is in for portraying the future now. The sprawling cities made up in the satellite not only remind me of Fifth element, they remind me of paintings of Trantor from Isaac Asimov's Foundation books. That's a good thing because I fear that if Foundation ever got adapted we're stuck with modern sleek with no definitions. Everything looks lived in Valerian, most set designs for the future, or the past don't. They looked pasted on and sparse.
The plot isn't anything amazing, or world bending, but it's the adventure that I liked and it teaches a moral lesson of foregoing protocol when an injustice is made. When the bad guy of the film says he's a soldier and will take genocide over humiliation, (paraphrasing, I know i have some words off) you wanted him to get it.
Another thing I liked that will bother people is the nineties style writing and dialogue. It was refreshing. I watch a lot of films from my childhood that would now be called out for bad writing because people have earnest emotions and say what they mean and then ridiculous stuff happens that escalates, or fixes a sticky situation and they don't break the fourth wall and turn snarky over it. If Cara Delevingne rolled her eyes less like a poor man's Emma Stone, or Dane DeHaan did more than ape Keanu Reeves's speech patterns it would have felt more classic.
Of course there's probably a lot of things people especially on tumblr would have a discourse over, like Valerian housing a woman's soul. I as a transmale didn't find it offensive, but it's not for me to say how a transwoman would feel about that. Things relating to the body and mind become a tricky (hate that fucking word) or, problematic in sci-fi fantasy when you factor that in. It's why I see Ready Player One failing with it's avatar controversies in an age of social media dictating that you answer for your identity on a constant basis. Rihanna's character will definitely bother people. Herbie Hancock doesn't get enough to do. The relationship between Valerian and Laureline will bother people too among other things I can think of.
Anyway, I don't regret seeing this movie and will probably own it if I see it discounted. I would like for some sequels to happen, but it's not going to happen because we can't have cool things. I wish we could have more space opera's that aren't Star Wars, Star Trek, or Marvel. I think this movie does way better than what a lot of people complained about Jupiter Ascending lacked. It's just a shame it isn't perfect enough to garner another chance and we probably won't see another space opera property outside of the big three for another decade, or more because of diminishing returns and then we're back to lazy post-apocalypse, tired teenage dystopias, boring cyberpunk and isolation, stuck in a spaceship survivor genres.
By the way I saw the preview for A Wrinkle In Time and and I know people are going to hide their racism behind unnecessary creative liberties arguments. Unnecessary creative liberties would be aging up Jonas four years in The Giver so he can have hormonal teenage angst and making it in color because people can't sit through the art direction of Schindler's List and Sin City, so his seeing color loses meaning, or how it had to be scored because people need to be bombarded with sounds constantly instead of daring to see a cinematic experience that could challenge you, or make you feel unsettled.
Meg was cast to look thirteen as the books. That's promising. So all the complaints about how Oprah shouldn't materialize and be a shining light with a disembodied voice is a nitpick. That's a necessary change because I've long learned that masking named actors backfires. That's why all superheroes barely wear their masks if they have them at all. It was wasteful of Star Wars to waste Lupita Nyong'o as a voice under motion capture, at that point anyone can do the role. Valerian at least showed us Bubble's two forms, Rihanna and blue squishy alien. I think about the fact that Julia Roberts in Hook had to have a lot of closeups to justify her being Tinker Bell because she'd otherwise be a glowing silent light.
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