Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
primesuspect
Beepin n' BoopinDetroit, MI Icrontian
I was pretty excited to see this. I am a huge fan of The Fifth Element.
The opening scene was tremendous. The first several minutes of the movie are a beautiful montage set to David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and it tells a story of an optimistic, hopeful, peaceful future where all human races come together to further science, exploration, and the race for the stars. Hundreds of years pass in seconds, and we see the first contact with aliens, the growth of a new galactic civilization, and a unified, peaceful government coalition of hundreds of worlds.
Then,
The movie starts, the lead actors come on, and it all goes to shit.
The acting is awful, the characters are miserable, the performances are phoned in, and there is ZERO chemistry between the two leads; since so much of the convoluted mess of a story revolves around their love, this is important.
What a mess.
Comments
Yes, Ivan. Thank you. That David Bowie, yes.
@primesuspect you're not the first person I've seen in the past couple of days that's had that opinion of the movie
That's unfortunate. I was pretty hopeful for this movie, especially knowing how amazing the last Luc Besson SciFi epic was.
I guess I'll wait for video.
My position is: If you're gonna see it, do it in the theater where you at least get to watch the delicious spectacle of visual effects and world building they did. The plot, premise, and effects are really really good. It's the dialogue and acting (and forced romance) that makes it seem small. They were a Gary Oldman & Chris Tucker away from nailing this thing and just couldn't get there.
On this one point, we differ. I think their romance was a tack-on from the 70s comics it came from. They shoulda ditched it and the rest woulda mostly been fine.
Wow, I just saw the trailer and it is REALLY good...now I am disappoint. On the upside, I weirdly just saw that lead in the movie Chronicle, which is a poorly known but amazing movie, so I hope I see him in more stuff despite this blunder.
Chronicle was really good, and totally unknown. I don't know anybody that's seen it, but I really liked it.
I am enjoying the one-liner hot-take reviews from Twitter:
"This is the worst movie I've seen in seven years"
"Spy Kids had better character development than Valerian"
"I'd give it a solid 35.2% but that's me being in a good mood today"
"They can't go into one species' territory for fear of causing an international incident but then they kill the king in the open... oookay"
Big budget blockbuster overload. You drain the collaborative talent pool because there is one coming out every couple of weeks. Look at Universal basically bombing on a monster movie franchise reboot with the Mummy. Now Valerian. I'm sure there are a couple other summer bombs. I think Hollywood is in love with the technology and the pace at which they can crank these things out that they have forgotten some of the moviemaking fundamentals. I'm a little worried about the Marvel and DC stuff getting too common, to the point where they no longer feel like special events, and maybe getting to a point where they tell a story to interwoven and complex that it alienates the casual fans and they just burn out on it. The blockbuster bubble may be about to burst. It seems like even making a young Han Solo movie is turning out to be a mess because they started with the guys that did the awful 21 Jump Street movies because like hey, they are not busy during the shooting schedule.... Maybe it's okay to only have one major big budget blockbuster a quarter, vs. every other week. Maybe say, hey, it's going to take two years to make this movie instead of six months, slow down the process, more quality vs. quantity.
It sounds like Valerian is a lot like Jupiter Ascending, heh.
See but I really liked Jupiter Ascending. I dunno.
I LOVED Jupiter Ascending. I just mean that they both sound like beautiful scifi movies with expansive backgrounds, crappy plots and minimal character chemistry.
I thought Jupiter's issue was a confusing and forgettable plot. While I'll quibble with Valerian's logic in a few places, I overall enjoyed the premise and never felt like they were just dangling visuals in my face to avoid the story.
PS: Ethan Hawke was great in this. Too bad his screen time was like 3 minutes.
I also enjoyed Jupiter Ascending. It's one of the few Sci-Fi movies I've been able to get my wife to watch. Mostly (OK, completely) because of Channing Tatum.