Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (Luc Besson, 2017)
Based on the French, book series Valérian and Laureline, this has the 'honour' of being completely independently funded through crowdsourcing and independently financed by Besson and his wife enough to give a production budget between $177–210 million, making it (according to Wikipedia) the most expensive European and independent film ever made.
It begins very cleverly with a crackly vinyl version of David Bowie's Space Oddity playing over 4:3 footage of the international space station beginning in 1975. This leads into a montage of the ISS expanding and crews from different countries, then different planets greeting one another on the ever expanding orbital research station. Eventually, the structure is too big and, renamed Alpha, is sent on a Magellan voyage into space. From there, the action shifts to the planet Mül, where the inhabitants live an idyllic existence in harmony with nature on white sands and with turquoise waters. This blissful life is interrupted, and then ended, when wreckage from a nearby board crashes into their orbit and a nuclear blast destroys the planet.
Somehow, this event has been transported across time and space in the form of a dream to Valerian, a major in a special police division which is tasked with preserving peace throughout the universe. After a mission where he and his partner Laureline, a woman he has asked to marry him but who isn't interested because of his long 'playlist' of sexual conquests, they learn that Alpha, now the titular City of a Thousand Planets, is threatened by a radioactive dead zone at its centre which is spreading.
The film is blessed with some stunning state-of-the-art visual effects and camera movements which go right back to The Fifth Element, which fully immerse you in the various environments and create the illusion of movement by making great use of the 2.35 widescreen frame. Sadly, Dane DeHaan is not a leading man and is from the 'sweeping brush in clothes' school of acting, plus he and Cara Delevingne have even less chemistry than Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley did in the last Pirates of the Caribbean film I saw (possibly the third one). The writing is also very clumsy and although it would be hypocritical to criticise Luc Besson's English because there is no way I could write a full screenplay in French, the line "evacuate the Commander" should really have been picked up by someone and reworded so Valerian was ordering people to escort him safely from the room, not empty his bowels. When most of the cast is comprised of people for whom English is their first language, it beggars belief that no one noticed this unfortunate grammatical mistake.
I hadn't heard about this scene beforehand, but the most memorable part of the film for me was Rhianna performing (with the help of a body double) a shape shifting pole dance, which is probably the only thing worth revisiting.
There are a range of characters, particularly the three-part Doghan-Dagui information dealer, possibly from the comic books, possibly not, but written in such a way that their interactions with the humans left rethinking Luc Besson was trying less to make an adaptation of the current books and more of something which would appeal to Guardians of the Galaxy fans. Unfortunately, this has none of the fun, sense of adventure or fully developed characters.
So, on one hand, this is a wonderful technical achievement, but on the other it is a sub-Avatar exercise in ham-fisted writing and cringe inducing acting. If you are at all interested in the film, go and see it in the cinema because much of what it has to offer will be completely lost when you watch it at home. If you want a futuristic detective movie, wait until Blade Runner 2049 (which coincidentally also stars Rutger Hauer) is released.
