Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017; dir. Luc Besson) is a visual beauty but empty beneath.  Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997) had novelty and frenetic movement and humor, but not Valerian. In some ways, Valerian seems almost to replay the earlier film’s formula.  There’s even a scene involving a transforming alien who sings beautifully (voiced by Rihanna) who ends up dying: this echoes a similar scene with a beautiful blue opera singing alien in The Fifth Element. There was more of a plot in the earlier film, but both films seem to embrace a video game narrative strategy, with a cascading set of characters and obstacles and twists and turns and battles and what should be rising tension that leads to the finale.  While The Fifth Element held one’s interest, both because something seemed to be happening and because of such actors as Bruce Willis, Mila Jovovich, Gary Oldman, Chris Tucker, and others, and also because of a riotous sense of chaos and motion, Valerian is monotonous.  There is supposed to be chemistry, sexual tension, between the two main characters, Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne), agents for the galactic government, but it’s not there.  Delevingne is the most forceful of the two.  She is certainly a physical presence, but overall she and DeHaan seem unaware of each other. The only picture by Besson that worked for me, besides The Fifth Element, was La Femme Nikita (1990) and Arthur and the Invisibles (2006).  The much-lauded Lucy (2014) had many of the same weaknesses as Valerian, and a ludicrous plot. Besson has shown at times a rich visual imagination, but in Valerian it almost begins to seem stale.