It’s a total waste of space

BASED on a graphic novel you probably haven’t heard of, featuring characters you won’t care about and a story that you’ll forget about by half way through, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is as overlong and bloated as its title.

Written and directed by Luc Besson, Valerian and the Obnoxiously Over-elaborate Title suggests that The Fifth Element director has fundamentally misunderstood what made his earlier seminal classic so brilliant.

Hint: It had nothing to do with the special effects.

With Valerian, Besson has allowed himself to get seduced by the glamour of using all the special effects wizardry available to create a sprawling alien universe, while completely neglecting the story underpinning the spectacle.

And isn’t valerian something you take to help you sleep? It seems fitting.

Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne) are special operatives who work to keep law and order in this future universe, where humans and hundreds of species of aliens all interact together, with the galactic hub of this society being the space station Alpha Base — the “city of a thousand planets” of the title.

Upon returning to Alpha Base after completing their latest mission, they are told there is a strange radiation spike at the centre of the immense space station and it is steadily growing, posing a risk to the entire population.

MARTAIN

Valerian and Laureline are dispatched to discover the nature of the threat and neutralise it.

That’s the central plot thread, anyway. There are all number of other tangents and side stories coming off it, some interesting, some pointless, and all of them serving to distract you from what is actually going on.

I’ll be honest, the film looks amazing. As an effort in worldbuilding, Besson has put in some great attention to detail, and you very quickly get the impression that there is a lot to explore in this cinematic universe he has created.

But we never really get to enjoy any of it. It is like being led through a story by a narrator with the world’s shortest attention span. Every time we start following a nice thread, something shiny pops up and we are instantly whisked off for a 20-minute thrill ride of irrelevant showing off.

I just felt like lots of stuff was happening AT me, but not really involving me.

And what makes it more of a shame is that it started out so well.

The opening scenes are a montage — set to David Bowie’s Space Oddity — of the evolution of human cooperation in space, starting with that historic handshake between Russians and Americans in orbit in 1975, through to the first space station, and then on into the future as the space station grows, as the first aliens come to visit, and eventually the evolution of Alpha Base.

Cinematically, this is a very tidy piece of storytelling, a brief sequence that quickly brings us up to date with how this future universe came to be, and what our place is in it.

But that shining light fades very quickly.

The story is so jumpy and loosely held together that the only thing keeping it upright is the liberal doses of exposition dumped into the script at depressingly regular intervals.

The simple rule of “show, don’t tell” is thrown out the window. We don’t need to spend any time getting to know the characters, because within the first few minutes Valerian basically just reads his character notes as dialogue, and Laureline does the same. It is so awkward it hurts.

And on arriving at Alpha Base, our two heroes ask their ship’s computer to “give us an update”, at which point the computer proceeds to expound the entire Wikipedia entry on Alpha Base, detailing its history, its social make-up, its economy, and so forth.

Valerian and Laureline work there. They don’t need an update on the station’s demographics and industry. Let me experience and discover this world through the screen, don’t read me a list.

Awful, lazy scripting aside, the film also suffers from some drastic tonal shifts. In the middle of serious dramatic scenes, we get incongruous comedic pratfalls and goofball sound effects. It is just weird.

The theatrical concept of deus ex machina (“the god from the machine”) refers to any plot device whereby a problem is solved or the story is advanced through the sudden intervention of some new event or character, out of nowhere and with no previous connection to the story. This entire film felt that way to me. The plot was so unimportant, the story so neglected, that the only way to bump it along in between action sequences was to just dump in some huge glob of exposition to remind us of what’s going on, or to just conjure up a new tangent or McGuffin to get it moving again.

And none of it really means much. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is as bright, shiny, sweet and hollow as an Easter egg. For all its technical artistry, the final result is oddly unsatisfying.

is now showing at Village Cinemas and Cmax, rated M. RATING: