“Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets”: An Exercise in Meaningless Filmmaking

Last night I saw “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets”. I was looking forward to this film because it was directed by Luc Besson, who had directed “The Fifth Element”, a film close to my heart. So I was excited, and many were for different reasons than I was, notably over the much hyped special effects, and Rihanna’s cameo. This movie was ultimately a disappointment as it fell very flat for me. Yes, the special effects are there and they look lovely, but that’s…almost it. The main story of the film is a super cliché, predictable piece of shit. To give you a bit of it, an alien princess transfers her soul into Valerian during an apocalyptic event that eassignment which leads them smack dab into the remnants of that species. Guess what happens next. If you guessed that they uncover a conspiracy within their government where it turns out that the supposed good guys they work for totally massacred the planet on purpose and didn’t care, and now the “heroes” have to help the noble persecuted indigenous people find justice, you’re right. How easy was it to guess that?

Where’s the character writing, or development? Clive Owen is a one-note bad guy you could see coming a mile away. Dane DeHaan’s titular Valerian is supposed to be a suave, roguish, badass soldier, like Han Solo meets Rambo. Cara Delevigne’s character Laureline is meaningless eye candy, she doesn’t even have a character. She’s Ivy League, a brand new soldier, and she doesn’t like obeying the rules. That’s it. Stereotypically, wouldn’t it make more sense to the way their characters are written if she’s straight-laced and he’s the rule breaker? Actually, in the original French comic, Valerian is straight-laced, and Laureline is more of a femme fatale. Why did Luc Besson clumsily try to switch their roles? What benefit did this give the film or its writing other than by shirking expectation?

I have a problem with how badly these characters are “written”. First of all they’re badly cast. Valerian is not hot, he’s creepy looking. Second, he has no charm or charisma, either the character or the actor. Dane DeHaan would be better off in horror movies where he can kill people, because he looks like an anorexic serial killer. What do we know about his character? He’s “the best”. But we never see any demonstration of this even remotely until the third act. So why not show us from the beginning? That way you don’t need to have everyone say he’s the best, you can show it. He’s a womanizer, and he wants her to marry him, and he has to give up his “playlist”, a futuristic version of his “little black book” before she marries him.

See, it’s that shallow. There is no character development besides an unlikeable prick deleting his list of women he’s fucked before Blonde Woman #634 marries him. You could replace her with a desk lamp, she has no character. And how does he do this herculean feat, you ask? By getting the spirit of an alien princess inside him, which in addition to being a contrived plot engine also has the added benefit of this spirit, as well as Rihanna’s character “Bubble”, teaching him how women feel. And yes, Laureline undercuts the already laughable excuse for character development by, wait for it, making a transgender joke!

And while we’re on the subject, Bubble is essentially a non-character. Her “real form” is a weird, amorphous, nondescript blue blob creature, who in Rihanna form does an honestly awkward and needlessly sexualized striptease/pole dancing/hula hooping routine which was trying way too hard to be reminiscent of old burlesque shows. Rihanna has about five minutes of screen time in the same scene as Ethan Hawke, who also has that same amount of screen time, and then she dies. Before dying, her dialogue towards Valerian essentially explains that she was enslaved and brought to this planet to be a dancer. Here it appears that the film starts to make social commentary on the existence of sexual slavery being used to feed the dregs of a society that appears to be post-bigotry, enlightened, and equal, but is merely a hollow façade hiding the capitalistic creed and exploitation underneath the surface.

However, this opportunity to actually write something good, and to do so subtly is immediately undercut by the reveal that she’s a princess as well, and she makes a death speech about how she’s passing on her wealth to Valerian. That never actually impacts anything, and ultimately Bubble has no personality, and her character is literally emotionally completed by Valerian saying that he loved her dancing. She was “technically” useful by helping him sneak into a place where “the bad things” have Laureline, who literally becomes a damsel in distress, only to die immediately after. Ultimately, Rihanna’s character has no agency, no self-esteem, exists to be rescued, just like Laureline. Neither Valerian and Bubble, nor Valerian and Laureline have any chemistry or something even remotely resembling writing. The screenplay was written personally by Besson. This weird French guy couldn’t write a good story to save his life. Every story beat was a predictable cliché.

And I’ve heard a lot of people describe this movie as “fun”, but it wasn’t fun for me. I can see how Luc Besson “tried” to make it fun, which it his mind equals weird, silly comedy. Fun is not always synonymous with funny, and in certain media and thematic choices within that media, trying to make it fun by making it unbearably light-hearted to the point where it’s meaningless dreck with no weight to it, is a horrible mistake. Valerian is the embodiment of that failure; it tried to be fun and failed. In order to argue this, I need to give examples of other films that did what Valerian tried to do, but better.

For me, fun is Indiana Jones and Star Wars, films that did have light-hearted moments of comedy, but balanced them out with necessary and effective drama. In Star Wars, the destruction of Luke’s family is a serious emotional blow to a character that the film develops in the first act of the film. We get to know the main characters in Star Wars for at least 40 minutes before Obi-Wan, Han, Chewie and Luke end up starting to go on Obi-Wan’s mission to rescue Leia. These are serious story beats that serve to introduce us to the Empire, an ominous weight for the tone of the film, weight which is appropriately pointed with amusing banter between the main characters, which served to develop them and flesh out the narrative of the film as Han and Luke learn about the Rebellion’s fight against the Empire, and then sadness with Obi-Wan’s sacrifice that spurs Han and Luke to join the rebellion and fight evil. Han learns to trust. Luke learns to believe, in both himself and in something greater. And Leia gets to fulfill her vision of freeing thousands of planets and billions of lives from essentially Nazis in space.

In Indiana Jones, fun is watching the adventures of an intelligent, skilled, quirky, well-written, subtle main character who believes in safeguarding antiques and historical relics to the public trust, to keep them out of the hands of the Nazis. But because the Nazis are hell bent on destroying other cultures and their history. It’s not about politics, Indiana Jones isn’t a member of Antifa. He’s an archaeologist who gives a shit about preserving history where the Nazis want to destroy it, so he joins up with the OSS and works for the Allies, risking his life to stop the Nazis at all costs. He’s assisted by scholars and treasure hunters in order to solve a mystery deep in the desert, all to beat the Nazis to the greatest treasure perhaps in all of history and mythology, not to covet it, but to protect it. The sometimes light-hearted and even comedic adventure of Indiana Jones is balanced out by the seriousness of the Nazi threat, and they keep hammering home that if the Nazis get the Ark of the Covenant, or the Holy Grail, the world will literally be over, because the Nazis will keep killing until there is nothing, and no one left. Fun is a fantastic world that’s well-built in myth and atmosphere, good dialogue and character development from a good script, helmed by a solid writer and director, which balances light content with a serious threat and a sense of dread.

Valerian didn’t have this, any of it. Valerian is only lightness, with the tiniest of dramatic elements that are immediately discarded. The destruction of the natives in the beginning is immediately overwritten by the weird flirtation and lack of chemistry between Valerian and Laureline. The drama of the military attempting to kill the last of the natives is undercut by Valerian whimsically dancing about the environment, shooting robots, while Laureline is just punching General Villain #412 repeatedly in the face. Horrible slaughter is immediately undercut with a weird attempt at trying to make the audience laugh. Its best attempt is to say “oh my god, the clearly noble primitives forgave the Earth government for a terrible genocide, and now they left, so it’s fine now. One man will go to jail for a war crime that an entire military was complicit in.” The paper-thin characterization of Laureline is only there to persuade Valerian to give the noble natives the MacGuffin they need in order to leave. Valerian’s by-the-book faith in his government is deliberately undercut by his poorly-written roguish nature. No justice is to be found, no growth happened other than Valerian giving Laureline a ring and promising to delete his spank bank.

The frustration of this film is that the special effects are there to distract you from the fact that this film is flash and filler, and no substance. This film is a giant, pretty pile of poorly paced nothing.