★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
Luc Besson barely avoids going full Wachowski in this overstuffed sci-fi adventure. Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne star as special operatives Valerian and Laureline, a bickering will-they-won’t-they duo charged with uncovering a massive disturbance at the heart of a vast space metropolis, home to countless sentient species.
The production design of Valerian is almost worth the ticket price by itself: seemingly limitless aliens, spaceships, locations and future tech are immaculately rendered and displayed with absolutely eye-popping abandon…but boy, is it tiring. This overload has been praised by some as ‘ambitious’, but I don't see the ambition in simply throwing everything at the screen. Besson’s crowded frame occasionally resembles a lumpen mixture of John Carter (can’t help feeling like a rip-off despite existing decades prior to the properties it calls to mind) and Jupiter Ascending (a ‘visionary’ director equipped with more money than sense). Nowhere is this better demonstrated in a chase sequence which kickstarts the second act: if Valerian’s ship didn’t look like a Poundland Millennium Falcon, it’d be impossible to pick out from the surrounding visual soup.
For all the ocular wonder and visible diversity, the political attitude of progression and multiculturalism (a beam-worthy montage of humans greeting a myriad of alien representatives to the tune of Bowie’s Space Oddity opens the film) is upset by a disappointing tang of misogyny in the aftertaste. Delevingne is very poorly served by a script that requires Laureline to be rescued a lot and complain about Valerian’s inability to commit, all the while her suitor cracks jokes about her inability to drive. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that her name has been dropped (the original comic series was titled Valerian et Laureline) by a director who says women “look so fragile”, and by a film that’s more devoted to its hero than his supposed equal, never mind the audience.
DeHaan remains a bit of a charisma vacuum for me, and watching Rihanna as an alien stripper (don’t ask) running rings around him before being swiftly booted from the plot only served to exacerbate the disconnect. Once the crooning popstar and Ethan Hawke as her pimp, Jolly, have left the picture, Clive ‘Hand me another slice of ham’ Owen is the only one apparently having any fun beyond the halfway mark. We certainly aren’t.
