Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets [DVD] [2017]

Good 4 the mouny

hugely entertaining

When Rihanna isn’t the worst casting choice in your film you have a problem. I know, I know. Every other article/post/whinge about the film that you will have read has gone on and on (and on and on) about the hideous errors in casting Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne in the lead roles and I have to agree. They don’t fit the source material (according to the comics he is a square jawed, by-the-book soldier who is a bit of a “shoot now ask questions later type” from the 28th century, she is an 11th century red headed French peasant girl that got swept up in a Doctor Who style timey-wimey companion way), but they also don’t fit their own characters within the grand scheme of things as laid out by the film (which I can accept wanted to, ironically, modernise them a bit) and they sure as hell don’t have any chemistry with each other as a team, romantic or otherwise. To be honest, their acting isn’t awful, they hit their marks and delivered their lines and kept the plot going, but it just didn’t work for me, it was a bit devoid of, well, anything really and that’s all I’m going to say on that matter.Those two aside though, I loved the film! Firstly, it looks GORGEOUS. The special effects were absolutely stunning, the space scenes were epic, the city scenes even moreso. From the sweeping vistas, to the tiniest detail, it just pulled you in and held you rapt to the screen. I loved the concept of the Big Market near the start that you can only see through special goggles, otherwise it looks like you’re standing in the middle of a huge desert and the separate zones on the space station all had their own characteristics, there was nothing generic about them. The story too was actually great fun! Pretty simple as plots go, yes, but swashbuckling action and adventure of the over-the-top kind that you’d find in the Star Wars or Indiana Jones films. However you could tell that it was Besson and not Spielberg behind Valerian, both as screenwriter and director, because the film had Besson’s signature deftness of touch that gave it that special French feel - you'll know what I mean if you've watched other French cinema. The humour had his oblique dry wit, the violence was suitably “graphic novel” in its graphic-ness and the incidental characters and species were utterly wonderful, adding a real richness to the environments. Talking of whom, the cameos were absolutely superb! Yes, even Rihanna who, after her... umm... interesting pole dance, really gave her character a personality that made you want to root for her. Add to that Ethan Hawke out-Depp-ing Johnny Depp as her cowboy/pirate/pimp/club owner, Herbie Hancock scowling through the monitors as the Defense Minister and the legend that is Rutger Hauer as the President of the World (ok World Federation but... yeah, World really) and, lead characters aside, the casting is really cool. And that’s before we get to the magnificence of Clive Owen as the Commander – but I don’t want to spoil the story.So do your best to get past the casting of the leads (it IS possible and didn’t spoil the film at all for me when I stopped worrying about how much better they could have been if they had been somebody else and just went with it), realise that you’re going to get a film that is massively style over substance and just spend a couple of hours with your intellect switched off and your imagination switched on and you’ll love it.

Valerian is classic Space Opera in excellent 3D and superb natural surround sound presented in extravagant detail by Luc Besson, drawing on his experience in making the Fifth Element twenty years earlier. The CGI uses all the latest techniques and appears to be seamless with the live action. It is very easy to abandon reality and happily lose oneself in this exuberant romp through space, but those of us not interested in comic-book SF might well look elsewhere.Ignore the paper-thin plot and enjoy the action which is surprisingly close to how I remembered the two principals from reading the stories forty years ago. Delevingne steals the film with her enthusiasm and energy, and DeHaan is suitably stiff-upper-lip and one-track-minded.Luc Besson’s film takes the characters and the spirit of the stories, with the co-operation and blessing of the original authors, and adds a modern cinematic enhancement while avoiding confusing the uninitiated among us with the ‘temporal’ part of the ‘Valerian agent spatio-temporal’ at the heart of the originals. (In the comics Valerian is from the 28th Century and Laureline from the 11th.) It is good old-fashioned space-opera (ie not much science, but a whole lot of fun) given a French flavour; whereby the hero is gung-ho and plays by the book even when he might be wrong, while also sometimes being a bit dim and often needing to be rescued from embarrassment by his smarter but junior female partner, fortunately his heart is in the right place. In other words, it is a classic relationship that has been used many times in many works of fiction.Most French youngsters in the 1970s and 1980s will have been familiar with rugged square-jawed Valerian and his red-haired sidekick/romantic other half Laureline appearing as a regular feature in the comic strips; Besson was one of them, as he explains in the Making-of Extras on the second disc. I was lucky enough to have been given eight of the Valerian annuals from 1971-1978 to help me learn French, and kept them for my children, we all thoroughly enjoyed them, and this afternoon I enjoyed the film just as much – without needing to remember any French.I have the two discs set with the 3D HD on one disc, and the normal HD and Extras etc on the second disc. The sound is excellent on both versions of the film (137 minutes), with 7.1 (Dolby TrueHD Atmos) and 5.1 as the options, with stereo as the default on the Extras. The picture is 2.4:1 when viewed on a 16:9 screen. Digital download of this is available, and the code on my sample expires 26/11/2019.