Valerian: Popcorn and Spectacale

Yesterday Jan & I saw Valerian.

We believed we knew what we’re in for. The consensus among those of our friends who liked to comment on such things hit three points.

Horribly miscast stars, a tissue of a plot barely solid enough to take the film from beginning to end, and a visual spectacle possibly unmatched in film history.

Now we’ve seen it. And, yep, pretty much said it all.

At Rotten Tomatoes we are duly warned. Of one hundred and thirty-three professional reviewers seventy-two or a bare fifty-four percent, gave it the old thumb’s up. A fractionally larger percentage of nearly seventeen thousand ordinary film goers who took the trouble to register an opinion liked it: sixty percent.

Now, I am not a professional reviewer, and have qualms about even hypothetically taking food out of someone’s mouth. Not to mention my own experiences of having my work being savaged by people who don’t actually know what they’re talking about. So, I have a habit of only posting about films I can recommend.

Here I find myself in a bit of a quandary. The stars Dane DeHaan in the title role and Cara Delevingne as Laureline are certainly easy to look at. Young, attractive. All that. But, as it turns out there really is chemistry. And they lack it. Now, in part the problem had to do with the writing. The characters they portray are not particularly sympathetic, nor complicated, nor witty. When they do noble things, I never felt there was any particular reason behind it, well, beyond the need to drive the plot.

The film was written and directed by Luc Besson and based upon the French science fiction comic series Valerian and Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mezieres. Possibly Mr Besson would have been well served to hire a writer. The plot is as thin as a piece of onion skin paper. But, that said, I thought it was better than I’d been led to assume it would be. Pure space opera. A farrago of nonsense, but a delightful farrago, I felt. Jan noted how she especially loved the opening scenes setting up the beginnings of the city of a thousand planets. And, I concur.

And, yes, bottom line: what one is paying for with Valerian is CGI spectacle. And with that Valerian delivers. So, with caveats and perhaps thin praise, I am in the slight majority who liked the movie.

You want a summer blockbuster unencumbered by deeper complexities? Something that requires of a bag of popcorn and 3-D glasses and those new barcalounger-like chairs? Something that makes no demands on the viewer, but presents a universe that is fun and bizarre? Well. Here it is.

And with that, is this a positive review? I think it depends on your mood? Want it light? Don’t need actors who are compelling or particularly believable in their parts as long as the plot moves along and there is plenty of spectacle?

Here you go, one hundred, and thirty seven minutes of pure space opera.

A summer movie…