Thread for Luc Besson's new comic book movie: Valerian

to my astonishment that makes it look pretty good

the five yr old has watched the first trailer about twenty times, i assume it'll be the same deal for this one. doubt i could take him to see this yet though The Fifth Element at least is generally the kind of PG-13 movie that's not bad for kids.

xpost -- Yeah between that and the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel there's an actual sense of color schemes at work, which alone is a big plus. Antithesis of the Zack Snyder greyverse.

set photos and posters and stuff

http://www.comingsoon.net/movies/news/843357-valerian-character-posters-reveal-the-creatures-and-robots-in-the-comic-adaptation#/slide/1

I am all in for this.

Final trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcIlQFPbPnM

i get the feeling this will be a beautiful mess, and having just rewatched end enjoyed the fifth element recently i am at peace with that

Oversells the 3D a little. I guess all the video game shots of Valerian running headlong through/into/over stuff are from the same sequence that ends with his fall through the glass from the first trailer.

heh, i was just thinking 'wow i might actually choose to watch this in 3d!', which was kind of a novel sensation

Early word is positive

http://io9.gizmodo.com/heres-the-first-buzz-on-valerian-and-the-city-of-a-thou-1796520105

"Valerian is as gorgeous & epic a sci-fi adventure as you are expecting. However, the story & characters often get overshadowed by the world."

This may be the most negative thing Germain Lussier has ever written. The dude is a Peter Travers-level "I love everything!" gasbag.

Boy you got that right.

I was already drifting away from io9 when Annalee and Charlie Jane left, but when he took over I was done for good. It became just another superhero/Star Wars hype platform, like the world needs that.

Yes of course

http://ew.com/movies/2017/07/05/valerian-luc-besson-action-scene/

“After I wrote the sequence, I explained it to the crew for an hour,” he says. “They were smiling, but I could see on their faces that they didn’t understand a thing.”

And so at his L’École de la Cité in Paris, a free film academy the director opened in 2012, Besson recruited the whole student body to shoot a demo of the action scene’s 600 storyboarded shots as part of their curriculum.

“I brought the 120 students to the soundstage and we shot the entire scene,” Besson says. “They were the actors, they were the cameramen, the lighting people, the grips. Costumes, accessories. We put the 600 shots on the wall and one by one we shot them. They did everything in three weeks, and then we edited and put in some temp music.”

Besson adds with a proud laugh, “And then the crew understood the scene.”

You forgot the setup

A chase ensues between the minions of a three-nosed Jabba-type beast named Igon Siruss (voiced by John Goodman) and Valerian, who has inadvertently trapped his arm between dimensions.

Minor details!

All right, got tickets for a 3D showing on Thursday night so bring on the madness.

I've never seen a single Luc Besson film cuz of that Barbarella-without-the-'60s vibe.

Not even Subway?

no. That wd've been most likely.

The writer of this wrote on Letterboxd that watching Besson's entire oeuvre was "agony"

https://www.indiewire.com/2017/07/luc-besson-movies-worst-best-fifth-element-leon-valerian-1201857534/

That article is dopey. "Adele Blanc-Sec", "The Messenger", "Nikita" deserve higher rankings. Not a *great* filmmaker by any means but a pretty unique one.

he's produced some really interesting films, too.

As long as Morbs has an excuse to never enjoy things that I do, we're all good imo

I for one don't need a clickbait listicle to explain why I'm not interested in whatever drippy nonsense Spielberg's got coming up

drippy?? he hasn't melted any faces in 36 years

this looks awesome. who wouldn't want to see this?

Just got out of seeing it. Great, fantastic, 10 out of 10, so glad I saw it in 3D, wouldn't change a thing about it. Hits all the formulas just right, utterly gorgeous to look at, hope he does get to make more of them.

The AO Scott review in the NYT -- which I would describe as a sympathetic pan -- has many delicious one-liners. The tease is "Sci-fi on Adderall and Ecstasy."

He's a terrible critic and a mundane writer and has 0% interest in the visuals of a movie, but if you are looking for someone to halfheartedly and boringly recount a plot that anyone on earth could glean from a movie trailer he's your guy.

without looking at it i'm going to guess and say that AO Scott doesn't once give a visual description of anything in the movie in his review. wait, maybe he's blind. if so, my apologies. it would explain a lot.

well, he acknowledges the visuals are the point, sort of

Imagine crushing a DVD of “The Phantom Menace” into a fine powder, tossing in some Adderall and Ecstasy and a pinch of cayenne pepper and snorting the resulting mixture while wearing a virtual reality helmet in a Las Vegas karaoke bar.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/movies/valerian-and-the-city-of-a-thousand-planets-review.html

sold

a critic I sometimes like has panned this on pretty much purely social justice / gender pols grounds which, maybe it really is so retrograde that is tanks the movie but it seems like a weird thing to center otherwise

not a visual description. i need more coffee. a description of ANYTHING he sees in the movie. i just don't understand movie writers who have no interest in the whole moving picture part of movies. or sound either for that matter! what did it sound like? he should just write for USA Today.

"well, he acknowledges the visuals are the point, sort of"

LOL, yeah, a "hilarious" internet critic joke about mashing 5 things together and he's done! so tired. get a real writer, nyt.

"blank"...on acid! #yawnface

xpost You mean "uproarious" in NYT English.

AO Scott, I will bet you, has never rolled.

i just don't understand movie writers who have no interest in the whole moving picture part of movies. or sound either for that matter! what did it sound like?

The equivalent of music critics who devote their entire word count to gossip about the artist's personal life and analysis of lyrics as they relate to same.

that's basically all music criticism at this point

no it isn't

ok

ok

Should I see this in 3D? Normally I wouldn't

Yes.

ok

no it isn't

Valerian & Laureline: The Nebula of Ambivalence

i'm still gonna see this, 51% on metacritic which is similar to the 52% score the fifth element has on there. that seems accurate, i don't think this is receiving poorer notices than TFE did when it was released.

we're seeing it on the 4th

it grossed $226 m worldwide vs a $177 m budget... that's not good, but likely in the black eventually w/ digital sales/rentals.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=valerian.htm

Morbs you should watch Léon, it's a triumph of Manhattan location scouting.

it grossed $226 m worldwide vs a $177 m budget... that's not good, but likely in the black eventually w/ digital sales/rentals.

a Europacorp person said it would have to gross $400 million to make up for their year losses, and they only held onto a a 20% stake

watched this on a plane. hollllly cow that script is a disaster. hopeless relationships, every line a clunker, important things really unclear (have valerian and laureline been dating already or has he just proposed out of the blue? is he a by-the-books soldier or a rakish rebel who's always stretching the rules? are they one-of-a-kind supercops or are there hundreds of their ilk? what exactly is valerian talking about when he asks their spaceship to give him "everything you've got" for the final firefight?) while other things are just beaten into your skull. i like how we find out three separate times that all the important files are suspiciously classified, then the good officer finally puts his foot down and demands access to the files, finding out exactly one piece of new information before hitting... something else that's suspiciously classified. i wanted him to call herbie hancock back and be like "hey you need to right-click on 'properties' and make sure you've set it to apply to subfolders." i also like how we're seven hundred years in the future, so our two leads embody mores, motivations, and ways of life that we cannot imagine or comprehend, but they still have the Ivy League and Wyclef Jean. rihanna's twelve-minute arc was a joke, the filmmakers got ripped off by hawke's and goodman's agents, and the big character arc for valerian is a last-minute fumble that never makes any sense. i will say it LOOKED great, except for the blobby cgi guys who capture laureline.

tbf my disappointment stems partly from how good that early sequence with the arm stuck in another dimension is - it promises something so wild and fun and comic-booky that the stock plot garbage of the main story feels like a cruel bait-and-switch. besides the arm bit, the best parts are the pointless water-treading episodes in the middle, when valerian and laureline each rescue each other from some surprise problem without advancing the plot in any way (or even remembering to call back to the previous go-round). but at least it feels like hijinks on a city of a thousand planets ought to feel imo.

also i do wish I'd seen it on the big screen. i tried last summer, but i was really hungry so i stood in line forever for popcorn and then it seemed to make sense to go to dark tower (which started later) instead. my mistake since that was generically lousy rather than memorably so.

another bit that sticks in my craw: in a laborious and overlong scene, the good officer convinces herbie hancock that he needs the security clearance because clive owen is presumed dead and so you really can't carry out the operation without putting authority in the good officer's hands. the request is granted and the audience has been walked through this logic. then, two scenes later, after it's been reinforced that clive owen may have been up to no good: "these killer robots are programmed to answer only to clive owen! but we have no choice but to let them hang around ominously in the foyer." just head-spinningly dumb, this whiplash between pieces of information the movie wants you to pay attention to that do not make sense when put together.

You are right that this is pretty memorably lousy (for what it tried to be, not even for what we wished it to have been) and I think your airplane screen experience gave you a much more detailed understanding of the plot mechanics than I could have been bothered with. Did I mention Dane DeHaan starring as Space Cop Spicoli? Because he sucks.

This has been my review of your review of a movie we both watched.

by complete accident I watched Dane DeHaan's "Last Thing On Your Phone" piece for Wired and, well, he is Spicoli.

How you read these comic books and decide that Valerian is only a pretty-looking chucklehead, I don't know.