It doesn’t happen often – but I decided to write a Review of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
My worry was it was going to be big on visuals, lacking in story, with Cara thrown in, to con teenage girls they too can be, “strong and sexy, intelligent and sassy”… and of course the director wanted her ass on set for a few months while filming.
And why not? It’s perfect to look at, but boy does she suck at acting. Her main contribution seemed to be close up eye rolling… and of course.. sass.
The line which summed all this up was:
“You really don’t know what love is. Love is more powerful than anything else Valerian”… I went and started vacuuming. And that’s not a euphemism. I literally went and got the vacuum cleaner and started the housework, I was so appauled.
After every impossible issue they encountered, there was an equally ludicrous solution. Except for those robots that belong to the general? “No, mate, we can’t switch them off”.
Right, we can jump dimensions, travel light years, and get inside alien species, but switching off some hardware is a task too far.
Watching Cara punching Clive Owen in the face just looked like foreplay. They made the same mistake with Kiera Knightly in Domino, size four girls just don’t have the physical presence to pull off any convincing on-screen violence.
Saying all that, she was more convincing than Dane “I’m a soldier” DeHaan. Who manages to take out the aforementioned invincible robots with merely a pistol and some sloppy moves? I don’t think I’ve seen a more soppy bollocks performance.
It’s impressive how much money, hard work, and plagiarism from Avatar (yeah, lanky, over CGI’d creatures in peril have been done before, just as boringly) can produce something so beige on every level.
Luc Besson used to knock them out of the park with “Nikita”, “The Fifth Element” and “Leon”. I can only assume he’s surrounded himself with “yes” men who make a salary irrespective of creative output.
If you want a film which is diametrically opposed to this in every way, try Jack O’Connell in ’71.