Haiku Revieu | Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
★★1/2

A pretty movie
Dane DeHaan is terrible
Haven’t I seen this?

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A dark force threatens Alpha, a vast metropolis and home to species from a thousand planets. Special operatives Valerian and Laureline must race to identify the marauding menace and safeguard not just Alpha, but the future of the universe.

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Special thanks to Colt, who provided the haiku for this review.

Full disclosure: We went to see Valerian in theaters  out of curiosity, because we thought it was the kind of movie that would be better, visually, on the big screen, rather than actually wanting to see it. With such low expectations, we had an enjoyable time, but it's still a pretty dang terrible film.

Thanks, for the most part, to Dan DeHaan's Valerian. I've seen Dane in other roles, and never thought he was amazing, but Valerian is flat-out awful. He makes Cara Delevigne's Laureline look good, and if you've seen Suicide Squad, you know that this is impressive. He's uncomfortably, laughably bad in the role, and it's super hard to picture him as a dashing space soldier/rogue. He's definitely better suited as the somewhat creepy maybe villain à la Harry Osborne.

The movie also suffers from many moments that are just too similar to The Fifth Element to be coincidence, given that both were directed by Luc Besson. I understand that Luc took a lot of influence from the Valerian comics for The Fifth Element, but that movie's too well-known (and too good) to get away with copying scenes/ideas.

All that said, the movie is pretty—lots of outerspace, futuristic tech and funky aliens—and I am glad we saw it on the big screen. The CG wasn't terrible, for the most part, and there's something to be said for movies that begin like Valerian does, with disparate people coming together in peace and creating something awesome to achieve a common goal. (I find the idea of peace with extraterrestrials a much preferable one to that of aliens who just want to destroy us.)

Just don't say I didn't warn you about the acting.

Check it out: