City of a Thousand Goofs

When we started watching Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), it took us two extended scenes before we found out why everyone hates it. The first scene, set to Bowie's Space Oddity, shows the ISS space station growing as Earth nations, then aliens add modules. The second shows an alien beach planet where gender-fluid, supermodel aliens engage in a pearl-based economy, or religion, or something, before a space battle levels them. These scenes are beautiful and engaging.

Then we meet our protagonists.

Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne are Valerian and Laureline, agents for the human defense organization that protects the ISS, now grown to immense size and free of Earth's orbit. They report to Herbie Hancock, which is cool, but that's about all that's cool. They are presented as douchebag and douchebaguette - Since they are wearing trashy tourist wear, Hancock tells them to change clothes for their mission. So they change into something worse - Hawaiian shirt over mesh tee for him, bikini for her.

But - the mission involves visiting a funky bazaar in another dimension, where Valerian gets stuck because he has a transdimensional gizmo on his arm and it's malfunctioning. All this is a good-fun action scene with a good twist.

THEN, they barely manage to escape while their squad gets slaughtered. Not only don't they try to save them, they don't even acknowledge when they get killed. Ms. Spenser was most upset about this callous reaction, not just from the characters, but from the movie. Myself, I wondered if it were intentional, to establish that the characters were completely self-involved - you were supposed to hate them. But probably not.

The rest of the movie progresses in more or less the same manner - wild, gorgeous visual sequence, obnoxious, stupid leads. A new character, a shape shifter played by Rihanna, is introduced with a Caberet-tinged strip tease. It's a beautiful scene, but it goes on too long, and fails to advance the plot much. SPOILER - Rihanna is killed when she is no longer useful, and our "heroes" just barely care.

I will pass over the "lousy woman driver" jokes.

Dennis Cozzallio liked this movie, which gave me hope. Could it be another John Carter, but it's more of a Jupiter Ascending, an interesting movie that was critically panned for very good reasons. But, you know, like Jupiter Ascending, on the whole I kind of liked this movie. I assume that director Luc Besson thought the leads were the type of people kids today go for - YouTube stars or something. Other than them, there's a lot of good in this movie. But it was no Fifth Element.