The first three scenes of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets pretty neatly represent the good, the sad, and the ugly of Luc Besson's nearly two-and-a-half hour opus, meaning that you should have a sense of whether or not this is the movie for you within the first half hour of its running time.
First up, The Good. In a montage set to David Bowie's "Space Oddity," we see a ceremony play out repeatedly: the inhabitants of a space station welcoming newcomers, shaking their hands after their pods join the expanding, unwieldy structure. First, beginning in 1975, this consists of humans of various tribes coming together: American astronauts welcoming travelers from one nation, then both welcoming members of others, et cetera, each time with a smile and a handshake.
After, we presume, the whole of humanity has come together, an alien space ship passes by—and the ceremony plays out again, over and over, new species from all corners of the galaxy adding bits and pieces of their ships and their technologies to the space station hovering Earth's orbit. Until, in the first major line of dialogue, an official played by Rutger Hauer explains that the station, too massive for Earth's orbit, will head off into the cosmos.
It's a simple scene and its power resides in that simplicity: the idea of universality, of peaceful coexistence, elegantly symbolized by a shaking of hands and an exchange of knowledge. Director Luc Besson also uses this as a chance to show off one of Valerian's strongest selling points, a menagerie of creature designs that puts every sci-fi movie of the last few decades to shame.
Next up is The Sad. We cut from the departing space station to a scene of blue-skinned natives living in harmony with their environment, casually flirting with one another as they perform some sort of ritual in which a pearl is consumed by a cute little varmint and identical copies are excreted 100-fold moments later. We are witnesses to the final moments of this idyllic world, as its destruction comes in the form of ships crashing into the pristine surface, vaporizing nearly every one of the Na'vi-like beings we were just introduced to.
The whole sequence is a short, near-silent film of sorts, one that uses just a few lines of dialogue to complement the expressive faces of the creatures whose near-extinction serves as the moral crux of what will unfold over the next two hours. Besson's skills as a visual storyteller are in full force here; the camera glides from moment to moment and face to face with an assured slickness. The last moments of a princess locked outside of her mother's shelter as a fireball approaches are as heartrending as anything we've seen on the big screen so far this year.
But then there's The Ugly, a sequence so ham-handedly written and filmed that I have some trouble believing that the same man who gave us the preceding moments directed it. It is in this segment that we are introduced to the film's title character, Valerian (Dane DeHaan). He is snapped out of sleep by a nightmare—the destruction we just witnessed. In an effort to put it out of his mind he begins aggressively flirting with Laureline (Cara Delevingne).
Now. I am not opposed to exposition, necessarily. I like good dialogue. Sometimes the audience needs its collective hand held. But after the preceding bravura sequences that told stories of creation and destruction with near-wordless brilliance, it was, well, distressing to hear DeHaan spitting out lines like—and I'm paraphrasing here because I was, honestly, too gobsmacked to get them down in my notebook—"I'm a straight-shooting soldier with a great sense of style who loves adventure and just wants to be with you, Laureline." She responds, as if it is not obvious, with something like "You're a playboy who is afraid of commitment and I don't want to be just another notch in your belt."
I wish I had a copy of the script just so I could show you the lines DeHaan is forced to read. They're so bad and so on the nose that they almost read as examples of how not to write a screenplay. It's the literal opposite of show, don't tell. Besson—who wrote the screenplay in addition to directing the film—just tells and tells and tells. Besson tells us character traits in such depth that I almost envisioned him writing lines of dialogue like "I'm 5 foot 8 and weigh 140 pounds, Larueline, and I've got my blue eyes on you, an attractive woman with prominent eyebrows and a very hot body because I want to have some of the sex!"
Perhaps this was necessary because DeHaan, an actor whose appearance is better suited for odder fare like A Cure for Wellness and Chronicle, is more or less miscast as a Han Solo-like space lothario. Or perhaps so much attention went into the (really, truly fantastic) production design and special effects that such lazy writing is the unfortunate payoff. Who can say? But your enjoyment of this film will rest entirely upon your ability to endure some real clunkers in between moments of enormous beauty as we unravel the mystery at the heart of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.