valerian and the city of a thousand planets

Luc Besson is best known for gritty-yet-kinetic 90s thrillers such as La Femme Nikita and Leon: The Professional, and has spent the better part of the 21st-century overseeing a prolific factory of Euro-flavored (and often Asian-seasoned) B-movies in the action genre (including, most notably, the Transporter and Taken franchises). But there remains a certain subsect of cinephiles (myself included) who remain most drawn to The Fifth Element, Besson’s punch-drunk 1997 sci-fi extravaganza, and held out hope he’d one day return to re-tap that particular creative vein. That wish was granted two decades later with spiritual successor Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, an adaptation of the popular, long-running French comic by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières that Besson independently financed to the tune of 180-million. Of course, the film fizzled at the box office - as so much idiosyncratic science-fiction with an auteur’s touch tends to do these days (look no further than the current performance of Mickey 17) - so this particular sandbox would appear emphatically shut down until further notice… though the fact the movie even exists in the first place feels like a minor miracle.   

Set in the year 2740, the film follows Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and his partner/sort-of-girlfriend Laureline (Cara Delevingne) - agents who work for the United Human Federation, whose remit is never really defined beyond “world-saving galactic space adventure.” Initially tasked with intercepting a priceless power converter, they end up on Alpha - the titular “City of a Thousand Planets” - and what an ecstatic reminder it is of the near limitless potential of pure imagination fused with hundred-million popcorn moviemaking. Originating as the International Space Station (in an opening credit sequence scored to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”), the facility started rapidly expanding once humans began to make contact with various extraterrestrial races… eventually reaching the point that it threatened the Earth’s gravitational mass and subsequently relocated to deep space, where - by the 28th century - it’s an entire world unto itself, teeming with thousands upon thousands of unique civilizations. When Commander Arün Filitt (Clive Owen) is abducted during an interspecies summit by a mysterious faction that appears to be connected to an irradiation emanating from the station’s center, Valerian and Laureline take it upon themselves to investigate.  

Never mind all that jazz. The actual plot - which is connected to the tragic destruction of an ethereal, peace-loving race and their idyllic home world years earlier - proves paper cut thin. But Besson compensates by cramming every inch of the frame with visual wonder… as if he were wielding a laser pointer, deliberately drawing our feline-like attention wherever he chooses. He’s one of the few filmmakers who feels as if his creative batteries are still drawing juice through jumper cables hooked directly to the works of George Lucas. The opening sequence, in which Valerian and Laureline must infiltrate a sprawling marketplace that exists in an alternate dimension, is a mind-melting feat of staging and spatial logistics. This is the sort of bananas moviemaking in which Laureline is captured by a primitive tribe whose chief intends to crack open her head like a soft-boiled egg during a lavish banquet… and the only way Valerian can save her (without causing an international incident - although he sort of does anyway) is by recruiting a shape-shifting cabaret performer who happens to be played by pop starlet Rihanna. Besson keeps the proceedings unapologetically whacky - he displays almost none of James Cameron’s mythic self-seriousness, though there’s plenty of Avatar’s digital DNA in the movie’s circulatory system. It’s not always for the better - the film adopts Lucas’s tendency towards crudely rendered and culturally inappropriate alien beings (a trio of nebbish, snout-nosed “information brokers” give off the same whiff of antisemitic caricature as Watto did in The Phantom Menace). But the sense of escapism Besson conjures comes largely fused with an appreciable sense of childlike wonder, free of self-referential irony. It would be a stretch to call it an 80s throwback, but the spirit of that decade’s moviemaking frequently ripples across the screen.       ​

It’s impressive the film works as well as it does, given that one could easily argue that both leads are dreadfully miscast. DeHaan had early success playing emo creeps and troubled misfits in projects such as Chronicle, Kill Your Darlings, and The Cure For Wellness (he was particularly good as an angry, gay adopted teen in the third season of In Treatment), but where Besson got the idea that he could pull off a roguishly charismatic hero in the Han Solo mold is anyone’s guess. DeHaan’s physical stature is seriously lacking - he always looks like the slightest actor on-screen, slouched over like a petulant high school slacker - and his decision to essentially play the role as some winking Keanu Reeves impersonation is jarring (albeit semi-amusing, once one acclimates to the choice). Delevingne fares somewhat better, but she’s a mostly charmless performer and this is a mostly charmless performance. She comes across as what she basically is - a supermodel who wandered into acting and feels somewhat ambivalent about it. There’s a haughty detachment that seems baked into her features - her glower feels staunchly immune to the film’s robust sense of spectacle. To say the duo has minimal romantic chemistry would be an understatement. And yet… the film somehow manages not to falter. This is likely because Besson maintains forward momentum at all times. Valerian is a film in perpetual motion - both horizontally and vertically - literalized by a sequence in which the title character builds up a head of steam and bulldozes his way through a cross-section of the station, breaching one eye-popping ecosystem after another. It’s the cinematic equivalent of racked pool balls moments after the break - ricocheting off the rails and each other in a pleasing dance of chaos. Initially it felt as if the best way to approach The City of a Thousand Planets was to take one’s enjoyment level of The Fifth Element and decrease it by maybe thirty percent… but I’d be lying if I said the movie hasn’t sparked a little more for me with each rewatch. That number now feels a lot closer to fifteen percent.