My Review of "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets came out back in 2017. It was touted as the next Fifth Element. There are a ton of Fifth Element fans out there and I was one of them. What some of us don't remember was how cheesy some of the Fifth Element was back in the day. This movie has a bit of that cheese in there but now I'm grown up so the nostalgia factor doesn't come into play.

The movie starts off with a great opening to show how the generations of human existence have evolved over our connection in space. Here you'll see the first people in the space station. Each new generation will bring in new groups of people to the station and it continues to grow as more nations join the station. After a few hundred years extra terrestrial beings start to join the station and the station becomes gigantic. It becomes so huge that they have to exit Earth's atmosphere and into deep space. This is the city of a thousand planets.

This movie could have been great if it was all about the city of a thousand planets but it isn't. We next jump into a utopian world that has these free beings. Their world is shattered when there's this huge cataclysm that destroys it. Before it's destroyed we learn of some of their cultural traditions.

One of the most important things that they did was that they cultivated some sort of energy ball from a native creature from the planet. That will be useful to know later on in the movie. It becomes the prime commodity of what this whole movie is about. Although, this movie does go into multiple directions as it goes on. One of the huge shortcomings of it.

We finally get introduced to our main protagonists Valerian and Laureline. They're soldiers for Earth's army and they are probably the most laid back soldiers you can find. Everything about them is quite odd. They refer to themselves in full name when their names consist of 3 to 4 syllables. It's really odd to hear in the dialogue.

They're also extremely small sized for soldiers. They look more like internet gamers than actual soldiers. Oddly enough they even look like siblings in a way as their facial features are quite similar. That makes it even more awkward to their already cringey romantic relationship. These two don't really have too much chemistry and the story doesn't really help it.

These two are to figure out the story behind the genocide attempt at the alien beings in the beginning of the movie. They'll go through a whole slew of adventures in order to figure out what happened. A lot of those adventures have nothing to do with anything in the main story.

I had a big problem with the lack of focus in this movie. They'll often go into various excursions for no apparent reason. A lot of it is nonsensical but I get a feeling they did it specifically to put on a visual spectacle for the viewers. Fortunately there is a lot of eye candy on the screen at once. You can tell they added a lot of detail in the art direction and the CGI that went into this movie. That's where you'll have the majority of the fun for this movie.

The main story really lacks and is extremely unfocused. That's not to say you can't enjoy the roller coaster ride of visual stimulation. You're going to have to shut your brain off a lot to enjoy it but it's doable.

Overall, I still had some fun with this movie however I did drone off more than a handful of times. I definitely wouldn't want to put this movie on rotation. However it is a visual eye catching movie that you could show off if you have a 4k version of it. As a movie I have to unfortunately give this one a 5 out of 10. If you can shut your brain off you can really enjoy this one.