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

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.