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

And if we’re going to have an obvious villain like that why fix what was never broken? Have a pasty guy with mock prosthetics ramble and rave like Jerry Falwell. It just works!

a completely wasted turn by Delevingne who deserves much better opportunities imho

What?!? The less I see of her the happier I will be. Intensely irritating.

Looks like you win this round, then

I think it could've been better if Rihanna and Delevigne had swapped roles.

Glad I'm not the only person that thought that...

The women were not the problem with this movie.

You could imagine a thousand planets’ worth of different casting decisions for all the female parts in this movie and none of them could address the issue of the title character being written as a schmo and played by Derp DuHuur

Also if you wanna be woke about Rihanna movies let’s get down about BATTLESHIP already, now there’s a completely underrated future cult classic and I’m not even kidding.

that was stated to me in person during the week fyi now im curious

Don't be, it's a load of USA! USA! shit.

it's fascinating sci-fi and raises important questions about what first contact might actually be like, while celebrating the overwhelming naval supremacy of a bunch of people who would literally never be caught dead in the US Navy, much less make it through basic

the casting in retrospect is truly amazing, and that's before you even get to all the other truly bizarre decisions that got tossed into the stone soup. I'd make one of my stock bullet lists here but it would just spoil things and this is one case where I don't want to

This wasn't (entirely) terrible! Mashup of Barbarella, Avatar and Star Wars, and I frankly think it did the Native American and/or Vietnam metaphor better than Avatar (tho with some wobbling).

OTOH you have our dewy ex-model leads beating up Clive Owen. (Cara Delevingne sells the sub-Thin Man badinage better than DeHaan, and don't get me started on his pseudo-deep voice; Christian Bale, you have much to answer for.)

I enjoyed the trio of approximately Semitic anteater hustlers cuz that's the kind of unwoke guy I am.

(btw this is the first Besson film i've watched)

not even Subway, The Big Blue, or Léon?

no x3

not even Le Dernier Combat?

i love Leon. this movie was not so good.

he must be so rich from the Taken movies. and the Transporter movies.

I relaxed into the film when I realised that Keanu was what DeHaan was aiming for.

definitely in the vocal timbre at least.

or Rory Culkin

he must be so rich from the Taken movies. and the Transporter movies.

I dunno, they make a fuuuckload of movies, and posted a $135 million loss last year before
Valerian came out and flopped.

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.