As the kids might say, I can’t even with Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. The latest comic-book adaptation to hit multiplex screens is basically a sci-fi gumbo, filled with enough colorful intergalactic characters, CGI’d-up-the-ass set pieces and otherworldly locales to populate an entire franchise. And yet, it’s all mangled together in a gargantuan, 137-minute pileup.
It’s as though America’s favorite contemporary French genre filmmaker, writer-director Luc Besson (The Fifth Element, Lucy), hedged his bets and crammed everything into one volume, just in case Hollywood didn’t come knocking for sequels. After all, the source material — the Valérian and Laureline comic-book series, which has been around since 1967 and is said to have influenced Star Wars, Conan the Barbarian and a bunch of other sci-fi and fantasy pulp — is very near and dear to Besson’s populist heart. In fact, Valérian comic artist Jean-Claude Mézières worked with Besson on concept art for The Fifth Element 20 years ago. (The Circles of Power, a Valérian volume from 1994, was a clear and direct influence on Element.)
The new film follows human time-and-space operatives Valerian (Dale DeHaan, talking and acting like he’s Keanu Reeves) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne), who constantly flirt and bicker when they’re not tracking down their commander, Arün Filitt (Clive Owen — why the hell is he in this?). Filitt has been kidnapped by a very Avatar-y race of planetless aliens who are looking for a small, adorable creature that shits magic pearls. I swear to God, that’s the plot. All this happens within the heavily populated metropolis Alpha, where humans and aliens have cohabitated for centuries.
Valerian certainly boasts one of the most unusual casts in recent blockbuster memory. There’s Ethan Hawke as a flamboyant pimp, K-pop star Kris Wu as a space captain and onetime replicant Rutger Hauer in a brief cameo as the president of humans. We also have Rihanna showing up in the second act as a shape-shifting entertainer whom DeHaan’s character refers to as “the greatest performer” in the movie. Perhaps the boldest casting move, though, was employing jazz-fusion great and futuristic funkmaster Herbie Hancock as a defense minister.
Even if you’re not a hardcore fan of the comic-book series, you can tell Besson went all out in making a faithful adaptation. But it’s his overeagerness to give us a comprehensive Valerian epic — Besson doesn’t adapt one volume from the series, but rather takes bits and pieces from several — that makes the whole thing a bloated slog. As much as the director wants to wow us with an extensive universe of alternative dimensions and interplanetary beings living in a harmonious existence, Valerian is still the campiest, most insufferable, most cheesy-looking space opera I’ve seen since The Ice Pirates.
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