When creepy boy meets stereotypical female boss
Where are a hermeneutic world and internal logic when you need them?
Hollywood keeps reinforcing an incredible idea: average-looking dudes are in the same league as hot women.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets also plays into this straight-male wishfulfillment fantasy, with its titular lead, a soldier in a galactic federation, played by the sullen, pale, puffy-eyed Dane DeHaan (The Amazing Spider-Man).
His romantic-professional partner, Sergeant Laureline, is played by the striking British model Cara Delevingne.
The two go on a dangerous mission to retrieve a rare creature that craps out energy in the shape of beautiful pearls, from a desert planet containing a virtually simulated market — for daffy tourists to get their intergalactic shop on — layered atop the dusty surface.
The film is a hodgepodge of sci-fi influences: the kooky variety of aliens intermingling in the bazaar recalls Star Wars, the utilitarian inter-planet federation is vaguely Starfleetesque (though, their boxy green uniforms are pointedly more fascist-looking).
Soon enough, the duo is alienated from their assignment and team, headed by a bullish commander (Clive Owen).
Valerian and Laureline begin to unravel a federation conspiracy involving an intelligent alien species that once lived on a paradise planet that was mysteriously blown up.
That’s an extremely brief synopsis of the film’s convoluted 137-minute-long narrative that uses distracting digressions — Rihanna plays a shape-shifting erotic entertainer in one memorable but unnecessary episode
— as its primary method for fantastical world building.
The results are kaleidoscopic, though anyone familiar with French director Luc Besson’s splashy work (The Fifth Element, Lucy), will not be surprised.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is colourful, multitudinous, often imaginative, but the lack of a hermeneutic world and internal logic lessens the stakes for the viewer to care about.
The actual core of the story — about the terrible mistreatment of the intelligent, nature-loving alien species — is an explicit but surprisingly compelling allegory about the brutality of colonialism and capitalism.
The film, however, is more interested in its romantic human leads than the pacifist, pearlyskinned, translucent aliens.
It’s a shame, given that the fleeting moral conflict Valerian and Laureline face in not following orders is actually the most interesting part of the movie. Instead of further investigating this conflict, it’s easily resolved by a Power of Love trope. How cheesy.
The film’s misguided reliance on romance is present from the get-go, when Valerian hits on Laureline, only to be rebuffed. He hits on her again, she rebuffs him again. And so on.
But Valerian’s pickup lines aren’t even cheesy, they’re creepy, as he goes from wanting to sleep with Laureline to wanting to marry her within the span of a single scene, because for some reason in the future, humans still believe a legally binding contract is a romantic gesture.
The lacklustre dialogue is only made worse by the casting. DeHaan is naturally creepy, not charismatic, and he keeps trying to deepen his raspy voice to sound more roguishly heroic and masculine.
Delevingne’s haughty Laureline meanwhile, plays into yet another gendered stereotype of female bossiness, having to prove every five seconds how much smarter and stronger she is than her male peer.
For a story set hundreds of years in the future, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets feels woefully antiquated even in 2017.