If we’re lucky, he’ll poop in my hand!
It’s a visual treat, but at its heart it’s a little empty. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) has a constant kaleidoscope of vistas, sometimes as background to the action, other times as the focus of the scene. Colorful and imaginative, they easily outclass the story.
The referenced City is a former Earth space station, grown so huge that the Earth chose to push it out into intergalactic space. Along with its original human inhabitants, many other species have colonies, some numbering in the millions. But a mysterious zone of radiation has appeared in its midst, and probes to discover the nature of the problem never return to report. As the zone expands, the commander of the City calls in Major Valerian and his teammate, Sgt Laureline. The Major and Sergeant have recently retrieved a converter, a living creature capable of reproducing whatever it is fed, and a pearl of immense power.
The Major is romantically interested in the Sgt, who spends half her time fending him off, but when a high level Security Council meeting is crashed by mysterious beings who kidnap the Commander of the City. Valerian pursues, with Laureline monitoring, but when Valerian enters the radiation zone and disappears from the monitors, Laureline disobeys orders and goes in to find him. After a successful rescue, though, she is caught and kidnapped by one of the more barbaric species of the City, who plan to make a meal of her brain. Valerian and a quickly recruited sidekick arrive just in time to rescue Laureline, but the sidekick dies during the operation.
This little spaceboat must have had a helluva kick to ti. See that planet below? It’s soon going to be nachos.
Valerian and Laureline discover that at the center of the radiation zone, of which there appears to be no radiation, is a force field through which they penetrate and find another species, this one totally unknown. They are the survivors of the collateral damage of a space war, the original owners of the converter and the pearl, and now attempting to build their own spaceship. The converter and the pearl are the last keys they needed.
And they are the kidnappers of the Commander of the City.
While the team negotiates with this new species, the temporary commander of the City has dispensed a battalion of troops to the force field, preparing to blow it up. With the battalion is a robotic force of soldiers as well, provided by the Commander of the City. When the temporary commander aborts the sequence to blow up the force field, the robotic force abruptly mutinies, cutting up the battalion as well as the City’s command area.
Valerian destroys the mutinous robotics force, of course, and soon we discover the Commander of the City was also responsible for destroying the planet of the survivors – with full knowledge of what he was doing. In the end the survivors of the war get their converter and pearl, the Commander gets his arrest, and Valerian gets his girl.
As I said, the visuals are imaginative and breath-taking. The story, sadly, has its problems. It’s hard to imagine a soldier with the rank of Major acting in such a childish, self-centered manner. The thematic material is erratic and, so far I could see, nearly trivial – act like a grownup and you’ll be a chick magnet. For all the imagination and amusing details and well-thought out scenes, there’s a hole at the center of this story, a failure to identify a compelling problem which we can recognize and evaluate as to its solution, or lack thereof, in this movie. Perhaps emblematic of the problems in this story was the reaction of the Major and Sergeant to the complete loss of their support team during the retrieval of the converter and pearl – none whatsoever. The sacrifice of brave men to a veritable monster warrants nothing more than a wisecrack about the altitude at which the monster was shaken loose from their spaceship.
Is this how much empathy and loyalty we have for team members in the future?
See it for the visuals, but try not to pay much attention to the story.
