Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Movie Review

Man I have been looking forward to this movie for months!…

…said no one ever. 

I really tried to avoid this movie. I thought the trailers looked like Luc Besson trying to relive his ‘Fifth Element’ glory days, and I really wasn’t excited about the two leads (Cara Delevigne and Dane Dehaan). It turns out that those thoughts were pretty much 100% warranted. 

Let me start with the good. I saw this movie in 3D which was one of the only times that I think 3D has actually helped a movie. The visuals in Valerian are glorious. At one point, I was wishing that I could just turn the volume off and watch the CGI spectacle. Granted, I expected greatness with an almost 200 million dollar budget, but that doesn’t make it any less beautiful. And that’s just about it for anything good I can pick out. 

This script is bad. So bad. Especially in the first scene between Valerian and Laureline, I knew listening to the choppy and unnatural dialogue was going to be rough. Now I get that Luc Besson was probably going for that Cosmic-Shakespeare thing that some space operas go for, but it just came off annoyingly. It also would’ve been nice to have some leads with chemistry.  Dehaan and Delevigne go along together just about as good at orange juice and tooth paste. 

With all of the bad in this movie, I have a weird feeling that 50 years in the future there is going to be a weird cult that loves this movie. It has some ideas in it that could have been good if they were written better, so I can’t blame anyone if they want to give it a shot. Enter at your own risk. 

3/10