Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (Patreon)
Content
Valerian was one of the movies I wanted to see the most for months. The advertisements about it made me extremely curious, I love science fiction so much, especially aliens and „space magic” :D
Well, the universe wanted me to see a good movie right before I see a bad movie. Yes. It was soooo bad. (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
I heard some reviews about the film, which said it’s beautiful, eye catching, but the story is just okay. I was interested in it despite all of this, because just an okay, simple story could be good too of course. In short, it was beautiful, eye catching as the chritics described it, but the story wasn’t okay.
It.
Was.
Terrible!
Imagine an RPG when the main „story” is to go from A to B, but to complete it you need to go trough unnecesarry side quests. The whole film was about just sidequest, made most of things unlogical, more chaotic than it’s reasonable. Here is an example, with very minor spoilers: Valerian and the girl get separated. So to find the guy, she has to do the following: The girl has to find a somebody, travel under water, find a creature, get some other creature, use that creature, and now he knows where the guy is. This all was like 30 minutes. When the girl finds the guy, they get INMEDIATELY separated again (!!!), and now the guy has to get the girl, who got taken in a house right in front of him, but to get in, he has to meet with 3 different new characters, and do things for/with them just to enter the house that was in front of him the whole time. This was like 30 minutes too. So that means 1 whole hour passes without the main story taking a single step forward! And this was just two example from the many pointless side stories.
And the next annoying thing was the main characters. They wanted to make them cool, tough, badass, professionals. Well, they really was in some way, but in a baaad way for me. Both were too superficial. I didn’t liked their motivation, their skin-deep, uncretive style. Of course there was moments when I laughed, but that didn’t happened many times.
There was so many cracks in the logic in the story, lack of connections, and lack of character development. Personally, the movie left me disappointed. It was awful, and honestly, boring.
But because I’d like to say positive compliment after the lot of whining: The creature designs, the effects and every visual thing was top notch. That part was a brilliant work and a perfect source of inspiration. The wrapping was beautiful. If you are interested in the external things mostly, and doesn’t expect a deep story with too much logic (or an awfuly put together story just doesn’t bother you that much), then you will have more fun than me. =)