K-SCORE: 13
Writer/Director: Luc Besson
Starring: Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke
Spoiler Level: Total and None
“this phantasmagoria of perplexing sci-fi bullshit speaks again to the utter deafness of Hollywood”
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets makes even less sense than its title suggests it will, which is the most impressive feat achieved by any story I’ve consumed in a year’s time. It has inspired me to write a semi-fictional memoir of my exploits heading a surrealist moving company entitled Kyle and the Box of a Million Larger Boxes. Any random twelve seconds of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is crazier than that video of Tom Cruise jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch. It’s amazing that writer/director Luc Besson was able to physically complete all the necessary steps to make a film considering that he hasn’t stopped mixing LSD, psilocybin, and baby aspirin with his morning coffee since 2001. If I was forced to watch but a single movie for the rest of my life, doing nothing else with my time, I’d choose to watch Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets for it is the only film I’ve ever seen that I’m not confident I could gleen all it's trying to do and say from two-hundred and sixty-two thousand eight hundred viewings. Sure my brain would be more addled than a paranoid schizophrenic offspring of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on cocaine, frozen in a time capsule and awoken three hundred years in a dystopian future, but at least I’d never be bored.
“Rihanna plays a large conglomerate of blue silly putty”
I’ve discovered in my work on this website that my readers’ favorite reviews tend to be ones where I just recount insane plots in my own words, reviewing by doing little more than writing what horrors I have seen. My problem in doing that with Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is that I can no longer remember what was actually part of the movie and what was part of the dream I had immediately upon falling asleep the night after I watched the movie. To piece it all together would require a fiscal quarter, and no one is paying me for that work. I hope there’s no market for it. I can say with absolute - fifty percent - certainty that at one point the model who appears in Suicide Squad as a skybeam-wielding enchantress is caught like a literal fish on a line where butterflies are used as bait by an alien species that wants to dine on her brain while she wears a wedding dress and a very large hat. I think Rihanna plays a large conglomerate of blue silly putty with the same eyes and mouth that ice cream stands use to make faces on the soft serve cones they give to children and really old people - whore, and Ethan Hawke is her pimp. That guy from Chronicle walks aimlessly around a desert talking to himself while his hand goes shopping at an Arab alien bazaar in another dimension. A metroid pried off the back of a giant sea monster is used to extract the location of one of the characters using the power of flashbacks from earlier moments in the film. Three anteater-rat hybrids who can only speak in thirds of sentences haggle with space military commanders, and the whole plot seems to hinge upon the protection of a frightened draconic guinea pig that shits out multiple copies of whatever you force feed it. Or… you know… not. I’m really not sure.
“I highly recommend you watch the film in a foreign language, one you don’t speak a word of”
I am positive that the dialogue and acting is so bad that I highly recommend you watch the film in a foreign language, one you don’t speak a word of. If I had another go, I’d try Finnish. It’s not like the film could possibly make less sense than when delivered in one’s native tongue. The creation of this phantasmagoria of perplexing sci-fi bullshit speaks again to the utter deafness of Hollywood and the studios that churn out such products. Imagine you are hungry and decide to try a new restaurant. You sit down, look at the menu, and order what was labeled “surf and turf.” You wait fifteen minutes. A waiter comes out and sets a plate in front of you that has on it the poison gland from a giant moray eel, the vaginal secretions of a dairy cow, and what you suspect is a human rib. To wash it all down, he pours rubbing alcohol into a pint glass. He slides the check closer to you without you having taken a bite and gives you an expectant grin. These people stopped eating food untold eons ago, surviving instead on mutagenic paste injected directly into their digestive tracts and this is their best guess at what you like, but they don’t care too much because just in ordering “surf and turf” you’re obligated to pay. That’s what filmmakers are like now. In the case of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, I tried the poison gland, I sniffed the rib, and I politely threw the dairy cow secretions into the garbage behind the bar. I drank all the rubbing alcohol. None of it was good. In fact, it was very bad. But at least it was remarkable.