Valerian has one of the best opening sequences of any film I have ever seen. It begins with real footage of American and Russian astronauts shaking hands on the International Space Station after a tricky docking. David Bowie’s Space Oddity plays on as we are treated to a montage of different nationalities shaking hands in space into the near future. Eventually contact with aliens is made. The montage continues as increasingly outlandish aliens meet and shake hands with the humans as their space station continues to grow, eventually spinning off into space.
I adored this sequence. The message of mankind abandoning fear and hatred in the embrace of science is beautiful. The coy but meaningful interaction between mankind and its new friends is beautiful. The incredible design and special effect work on the aliens is beautiful. The sequence is just beautiful.
I had walked in with fairly low expectations due to the noisy trailers and poor critical reception / box office performance. This sequence forced me to reassess and prepare for something very different.
Valerian’s strongest asset is its imagination. The worlds portrayed are utterly unique and mesmerising. One sequence, involving a vast market in another dimension that can only be interacted with through trans-dimensional goggles and gloves, has more ideas than most sci-fi films have in their full runtime. Just a few of the concepts featured in the film: guns that shoot heavy BBs that stick to the subject to weigh them down, clairvoyant jellyfish that live on giant whales, duck shaped monkeys with bat wings, a civilisation of beautiful Prometheus-style aliens that live in giant seashells, a little beastie who replicates anything it eats, a gnarled submarine pirate, Clive Owen, the list goes on!
It’s upsetting then that director Luc Besson chose to populate this extraordinary world with stock characters. Dane Derhan is inexplicably doing his very best pre-Matrix Keanu Reeves impression as Valerian. He’s a cool, smarmy ladies’ man with a heart of gold. He has fallen in love with his partner Laureline, played by Cara Delevingne. She’s a straight-shooting, sassy woman of action who rebuffs Valerian for the reason you’ve probably guessed by now if you’ve seen any movie made in the 20th Century: he has commitment issues. It’s one of the oldest character dynamics in cinema. A tiresome will-they-won’t-they that’s made all the worse for how two dimensional these characters are.
Near the end of the movie Valerian says “I’m a soldier. I follow the rules, it defines me!” This has never been mentioned before and nothing he has done throughout the movie has suggested this. Quite the opposite in fact! Luckily this conflict is resolved in moments, like most of the character conflicts in the film.
The gender politics are also a little backward with Laureline constantly taking a back seat in the plot and at one stage even getting captured because she was lured into a trap by a “pretty butterfly” (she says this phrase out loud as she’s captured).
Half an hour later she is released and the two resume their mission. Absolutely nothing that happens between these points is necessary to the film. Amongst other oddities: a sequence that features Rihanna performing a shape shifting burlesque show whilst Ethan Hawk crows like a bird. The plot has very little focus as is but this huge divergence in the middle of the film is very jarring.
The plot does meander but its divergences are, at the very least, memorable. I became enthralled wondering where exactly Luc Besson was going to steer this great, lumbering ship of a movie next.
My recommendation for Valerian may not be hearty but it is sincere. If you have a strong aversion to computer generated environments and clichéd characters you will, unfortunately, find an abundance of both. If, however, you can look past this then you will find one of the strangest and most imaginative blockbusters ever made. I can’t help but feel charmed by it.
3/5
Paul Salt is the co-host of One Good Thing.