The auditorium wasn't particularly full, given that the film in question (a moderately 'big' movie) was being released on a rainy Wednesday in the middle of a particularly busy blockbuster-season. Nevertheless, in all my years of cinema-going I have never before witnessed so many people go to the toilet during a performance, so utterly unconcerned were they with missing some vital element of the plot. Let us not drive around the houses here, Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets is bad. I barely even have the strength to be bitter about losing two and a half hours of my life to this, but for you dear reader, I shall try...
Quite often, the second paragraph of my review would be used to hold a brief synopsis or plot-premise. In the case of Valerian, I have no idea. Really. There's an opening montage showing mankind's future progress into space and successive diplomatic introductions to several developed alien species, and after some sledgehammer-exposition from Rutger Hauer, the story-proper begins. I think. Something like Avatar, but set on a beach and featuring small CGI armadillos that shit pearls into a well. Meanwhile, Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne play two humans who look less convincing than the animated aliens and fail to flirt (indeed, act*1) for over two hours, while Sam Spruell and Clive Owen pull that 'I've made a terrible mistake' expression in lieu of emoting alongside their lines. The five minute pole-dancing scene featuring Rihanna isn't even the worst part of the film, although it's as inexplicable as everything else.
So from the meandering gibberish of the poorly-established narrative, through the horrifyingly executed 'Han/Leia' dynamic of Valerian and Laureline, the piss-weak performances of inconsequential supporting characters, and to the desperate attempts to bed the property in as the cornerstone of a cinematic franchise, there is no aspect of this film which does not anger, baffle or disappoint. Valerian owes so much to The Phantom Menace that it's had to take out a loan from John Carter just to keep up the repayments*2. Even the countless other sci-fi flicks which exist solely as regurgitators of clichés and genre-tropes usually do so with more narrative coherence than this.
The final presentation is full of moments you know were fantastic in the mind of Luc Besson. So it's a shame really that as both screenwriter and director*3, he completely failed to translate any of that to the screen. Judging by the way the dialogue clatters off the tongues of the performers, I suspect Luc typed the script in his native French and then just ran it through Google Translate for the cast to read. I'm not sure what's more excruciating, when the film tries to be funny and cool, or those moments when it thinks it actually has some message to impart. The third act features an outstandingly distracting diatribe about the effects of economic anxiety and protectionist politics, which in any other contemporary movie could be seen as a quasi-satirical statement on the real world. Here however, it comes off as a cack-handed attempt to convince the audience that they haven't just spent the last two hours watching Besson's computer-animated cheese dream*4.
I suppose if you could credit Valerian with anything, it would be the visuals on display. It's all 'pretty', but in that way where everything's been over-designed to the point where each new scene gives you a different level of headache. The film looks like a teenager won the Euromillions and blew the lot on making a Jupiter Ascending fan-film.
Luc Besson goes from strength to strength, finding new and inventive ways of annoying me. That should be applauded, at least.
Stabbing your own eyes for fun.
No.
No.
No.
Yes.
Not that I heard, but I spent a lot of the film shouting under my breath.
Level 2: Well, this movie features R&B fembot Rihanna, who was also in the execrable Battleship alongside Liam 'Qui-Gon' Neeson.
*1 Dane DeHaan spends this entire movie acting as if he passed the audition doing an impersonation of Keanu Reeves. I wish I was joking. The stupid thing is, I like Dane DeHaan. I like Cara Delevingne. I have no idea what's happened here. No wait it's Luc Besson, isn't it?.. [ BACK ]
*2 And remember, I say this as someone who loves both The Phantom MenaceandJohn Carter. Yeah, I'm that guy. [ BACK ]
*3 No, I haven’t read the comics that this is based on. Besson has made a film so that I don’t have to. Allegedly. [ BACK ]
*4 I've written far more words here than I intended, but I cannot slate this film emphatically enough. It's a horribly ironic state of affairs when the only way to truly appreciate how awful Valerian actually is would be to watch it on a big screen, yet at the same time I cannot condone that in any way, shape or form. Please take my word for it. Apart from anything else, I don't want the film to make the money which would encourage any manner of sequel or expansion. Even if you've got one of those subscription type-cards and it doesn't cost you any more to sit and watch the movie, there'll still be some manner of transaction between the cinema owner, the distributor and the studio. Luc Besson doesn't care if you enjoy this film or not, he just wants the figures to show that you've seen it. Please do not humour him. It is worse than Transformers: The Last Knight, and I do not say that lightly. At least with that movie I could enjoy taking the piss out of it, Valerian doesn't even deserve that energy... [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
A feature-length aftershave commercial turned Jez Clarkson wank-fantasy where shiny cars, lens-flare and jaw-dropping misogyny take the place of any narrative drive or character development, with a cast (whose accents wander so much they need new passports half way through the film) who fail to plausibly deliver a script which has been written by a computer to feebly bolster a plot that even manages to rip off the franchise it's trying so unconvincingly to rejuvenate, featuring some of the most badly dubbed ADR you'll ever have seen if you can take your face out of your hands after watching the flaccid fight choreography that complements the script perfectly, and quite frankly the only people to come out of this debacle with any shred of integrity are the stunt-drivers, although by taking The Besson Shilling™, they themselves are no less complicit in this atrocity's existence.
I had low expectations for The Transporter Refuelled and it failed to meet even those.
An utterly, utterly turgid film, although I'm sure it'll have its fans…
No.
No.
Ray Stevenson's in it, so that's really a moot question...
No.
Yes.
No.
There is a boot-shot.
Not that that's any consolation.
Ed Skrein starred in 2012's Ill Manors alongside Riz Ahmed, who's due to appear in Star Wars: Rogue One.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
High-concept, action sci-fi isn't a genre you'd normally associate with the pen of Luc 'Taken' Besson, and after the Freeman/Johansson vehicle Lucy, that isn't about to change. His tale of a young woman who develops accelerated intelligence and telekinetic powers after an experimental narcotic leaks into her bloodstream, suggests that Besson wanted to make a superhero film, but thinks that comic books are somehow beneath him.
My main problem with the film is that I just couldn't buy into any of it. At all. I know that the super-powers exhibited in the Avengers series are absolutely fictional, for example, but they're set in a world which is real, and are governed by real-world physics. Lucy on the other hand, is based sincerely around the misconception that we only use 10% of our brains. It's not a wild and dangerous speculation to point out that this is bollocks, in the same way as Mars won't really appear to be the same size as the moon this year. Nonetheless, Besson takes a provenly incorrect starting point, and builds a story around it which defies all common sense, suggesting that humans all possess the brainpower not only to move physical objects with out minds, but also to overwrite the basic structure of science. And it all happens from the accidental ingestion of a drug which is designed in the film to be ingested, without a single person in the organisation which created it having examined the effects of its use. At all.
The real scientific experiment here may be 'what happens when I don't employ a proof-reader for my script?'.
In and of itself, it's perhaps not as bad a starting block for a movie as I'm making out, but the film fails to convince at every turn. Resident brain-expert Morgan Freeman basically spends an hour and a half shrugging and asking "how does that work?", while Scarlett Johansson's powers increase exponentially and she replies "look, it just does, alright? Science, and that". I wouldn't go so far as to say the film is stupid, just wilfully ignorant. For example, if Lucy can change the colour, length and style of her hair to avoid airport security, why can't she change the structure of her facial features? If Lucy can make a room full of police officers pass out at will, why does she spend the next half hour avoiding the Korean crime syndicate who are attempting to hunt her down? Why is a woman who can bend matter, still constricted by gravity and inertia?
By the time that Freeman asserts that our universe "isn't governed by mathematical laws", the whole thing has devolved into a nonsensical chase caper, with less cause-and-effect than the average Tom & Jerry cartoon. Lucy isn't a movie where you can leave your brain in the car park (you want Besson's 3 Days To Kill for that), simply because it keeps hurling fabricated suppositions at its audience for them to think about. There's just nothing I could believe in, even within the context of the film. And if you can't explain your premise using logic and reason, you may as well have your heroine gain her powers after being exposed to a solar-storm, or somesuch.
On a more technical level, Lucy is a curious mix of high-end CGI effects work, and regularly intercut cheap-looking library footage of safari animals, volcanos, cityscapes etc, which suggests that the budget had been well and truly spanked long before the film's final edit. Scarlett Johansson's performance is surprisingly agile, although hers is the only one, giving the impression that this could have been a much stronger film had it been in different hands from the start.
What's more worrying is that distributors Universal also seem to lack confidence in their product's appeal. The trailers beforehand (The Riot Club, Medea, Let's Be Cops, Sin City 2, Before I Go To Sleep, Sex Tape - in that order) suggest that the studio has no idea who will be watching this film, and so aren't sure what to pitch at them for future attractions. Although I'm sure if any of those feature Morgan Freeman as a beleaguered academic, it'll be right up the audience's street.
For a film about increased intelligence, Luc Besson takes a perverse delight in insulting the intellect of his audience, and it's perhaps ironic that I felt slightly more stupid for having sat through it.
Science-fiction for people who hate science, Lucy takes the incredible and makes it truly unbelievable…
Oh, it pretty much is, yeah.
Not nearly enough.
No. It doesn't.
Whatever.
A little bit, yeah.
I shouldn't think so.
Didn't hear one.
Has Johansson got an unfeasibly large overdraft she's trying to pay off, or something?
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
