VALERIAN: Where are the ugly aliens - and why am I yawning?
Luc Besson, mastermind behind the likes of The Fifth Element (1997), Léon: The Professional (1995) and the more recent Lucy (2014), seems to have lost his magic touch.
With a cast of actors that seem dead behind the eyes coupled with possibly the worst script ever written in terms of both predictability and unnecessary quips that just aren't funny, Besson's newest film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is nothing short of a gargantuan let down.
With a visually stimulating opening sequence showing the progression of mankind's expansion into space both technologically and socially through the introduction of various species of alien life - each more beautiful in their absurdity than the last - as a viewer you can't help but get excited at the promise of this film. Followed by a short but unexplained back story on alien planet Mül, we are then catapulted to the introduction of the film's main characters, Valerian and Laureline, two space agents tasked with a mission to recover property stolen from the federation.
Bearing in mind that we've seen awkward flirting before from Besson between Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element (1997); the romantic chemistry between Dane Dehaan and Cara Delevingne in this film as a contrast is both non-existent and a completely unnecessary addition to an unremarkable narrative. Between their bickering and poor acting it is hard to believe that Besson tries to sell this as some kind of young, cool, romantic space adventure - does that even make sense in a sentence? I don't know.
Dane Dehaan and Cara Delevingne are possibly two of the worst film casting jobs I've ever seen.
Watching this film I couldn't help but think 'is this really the best take they got during filming?' It's a whole 2 hours of half-assed acting that Besson only gets away with because we're so distracted by the epic and seamless visual effects.
In fact the CGI in this film is its only saving grace, but even then the aesthetics chosen for the many types of alien life represented were a bit too beauty-standard normal for my liking, and if this wasn't the case then they reminded me of creatures already invented by other people: take the three platypus-like creatures above - all I could think was that they were a modernised version of the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz (1939). Where are the ugly aliens? The ones that we would be grossed out by yet can be seen as attractive by other species?
Besson includes a Paradise Alley, not unlike those seen in films like Steven Spielberg's robot version in Artificial Intelligence (2001), or Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall (2012), or even the whorehouse depicted in James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2 (2017). I couldn't help but be bored by the female-after-female-after-female seductresses in this scene, none of them all that exciting or even interesting to look at.
Rihanna's performance was pretty good for what it was: a shapeshifting serenade through different roles - a sexy nurse, a cabaret dancer - again, nothing that wasn't predictable. And then her character gets killed off pretty quickly, returning us to just Delevingne and Dehaan yet again, yawn.
Watching this film, I was more entertained by the commentary from the two guys sitting next to me than I was by the actual film. As it finally drew to its conclusion and the end credits came up my only reaction to the entire film was "That was so unnecessary!" which you could apply quite liberally to any and all parts of the entire film.
To conclude this review, all I can say is that Valerian is not something worth wasting your money on going to see at the cinema. If you insist upon seeing it then wait till it's on your sky box or something and then come back and try and tell me that it was good...because it really, really isn't.
RATING - 3/10