I Watch Films: Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets

 

Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets

Alpha, once a space station around earth, now the “city of a thousand planets” where different alien species can all live in their own weird zones, or mixing together, whichever the plot or looks (it’s based on a French comic) favour.

Major Valerian is a space cop who is wild and arrogant, and also hitting on his (cop) partner, the serious Sergeant Laureline. Valerian has dreams of the planet Mül, a beach paradise where they are replicating pearls of immense power when debris from a battle reigns down. He wakes to find himself on a mission, infiltrating a cross-dimensional market to retrieve a Mül converter, a creature that can replicate things.

But there are other people there trying to get the convertor, including Mülians (though they aren’t recognised, all details on their planet having been classified). Back on Alpha a section has been irradiated and Valerian and Laureline are assigned to this problem, but during a council meeting to discuss it there’s an attack and their commander is kidnapped. Valerian chases them, crashes his spaceplane. Laureline goes to rescue him, succeeds, but is captured by other aliens. Valerian recruits a shapechanger called Bubble to rescue her in turn. Eventually they penetrate the irradiated area to find it’s not irradiated and the Mülians are at the heart of a couple of plots.

The whole film is delirious setpiece after setpiece, with weird locations and characters arriving, then vanishing, last minute escapes, and stupid or moderately clever twists. On the one hand it loses all coherence, but on the other with different environments, species and cultures co-existing it probably replicates the weirdness a bit.

Watch This: Visually spectacular and inventive adventures
Don’t Watch This: The adventures themselves are arbitrary and uninteresting, also Valerian seems to have gone through several previous female partners, suggesting he should probably have had HR explain the concept of sexual harassment