Review – Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is an experience unlike any I have ever had at the movies.  I am writing this review three days after seeing the movie and I still can’t fully grasp what I witnessed.  I can’t tell if Valerian is a groundbreaking masterpiece, a campy classic, or a complete disaster.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is set in the 28th century and follows Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne), two special operatives charged with maintaining order throughout the human territories of the galaxy.  When a dark force threatens Alpha, a vast metropolis and home to species from a thousand planets, the two must race to identify the menace and safeguard not just Alpha, but the future of the universe.

On the masterpiece side, I don’t know if I have ever seen a science fiction movie like this in my life.  This is such a unique and bizarre movie that it is almost mind blowing.  Director Luc Besson takes us into a world and a universe that is full of life, color, and wonder.  The aliens, the planets, the way things work, everything is new and interesting.  This new and incredible world is brought to life by the outstanding visuals.  This is one of the prettiest movies I have ever seen and the 3D enhances everything.  This is a truly jaw-dropping film to look at, as everything jumps off the screen from simple scenes of Valerian and Laureline hanging out on the beach to some of the exciting action scenes.

On the terrible side, well, that’s pretty much the rest of the movie.  For a lot of the movie, I had no idea what was really going on.  Was I just in awe of the visuals?  That may have had something to do with it, but not the whole thing.  The plot is all over the place.  There were aliens from so many different planets wanting something that I’m still not sure what and then a government cover-up and I don’t know.  Things happened in the movie and aliens who I thought were dead would show up and aliens that I thought were alive never came back.  There were too many audible, “what?”s coming from my mouth for one movie.  I also expected more from DeHaan and Delevingne and though they have their moments, they don’t really get the job done.  Oh, and Rhianna is in the movie for about twenty minutes and plays an alien stripper or something because that might be as far as her reach goes.

As far as the campy greatness goes, this could definitely be a movie to watch while inebriated or on some sort of hallucinogenic drug.  The visuals would probably be elevated to another level, you won’t care about the plot, you will find humor in the weak performances, and the ridiculous dialog would cause quite a few laughs.  Is this a new midnight classic?  Only time will tell.

I’m givingValerian and the City of a Thousand Planets a middle of the road rating because I don’t exactly know how to feel about it.  It’s visually masterful, yet is a hot mess in terms of plot and character development, and has has some less than stellar acting.  This could be one of those “so bad it’s good” movies and go down as a historic bomb, or maybe I am just missing the mark on a groundbreaking science fiction epic.

Did you see Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets?  What did you think?  Comment below or hit me up on Twitter and Instagram, @kevflix, or on Facebook by searching Kevflix.