Monday 7 August 2017

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

For me, watching Valerian was like going on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland for the very first time. Although there may have been flaws with it, the sheer joy of the experience meant that on leaving the ride I immediately wanted to run around to get on it again.

In the case of the film, immediately meant the next day.

Valerian is very much the spiritual follow-up to The Fifth Element, Luc Besson's earlier foray into completely bonkers, 60s-comic-book-influenced, science fiction. Like Fifth Element it has the type of dialogue that sounds like the English translation of French comic book dialogue (wholly appropriate as Valerian is an English language version of a French comic book). Characters also feel fairly flimsy, again as if they are very literal translations of their two-dimensional counterparts.

The dialogue and characters have come under a fair amount of criticism as a result, but for an apologist for the film, it feels rather more like this is how they should be. By not developing the characters to greater depths, and by having something of a mannered-translation approach to the dialogue, the film feels true to the feel of the source material. To that effect, it seemed to have similarities with the De Laurentiis-produced films of Flash Gordon, and Barbarella.

There are still issues with the story though. The early sequence with the inhabitants of the planet Mul had me wanting to spend all day on the beach with them, and the following sequence in Big Market is a melange of invention that is beautifully handled.

Nothing else in the film quite met the heights of those first twos sequences, but even so it was a film that kept me entertained throughout and, as mentioned, wanting to do it all over again once it had finished.

It's not going to be a film for everyone. But if you liked The Fifth Element before it was fashionable to do so, then you probably stand a fair chance of enjoying this. Whether you'll be quite as much in love with it as I am is another matter altogether.

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