Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Valerian and The City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

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Posted by Mark Ogden (Member # 43) on 08-01-2017, 06:21 PM:

At the AMC Starplex Cinemas, Ridgefield Park, New Jersey

*****

Hundreds of years from now, the beautiful planet Mül and all of its peaceful inhabitants are destroyed, collateral damage of a space battle occurring above its skies. The only survivor is a tiny creature called a Mül Converter, which looks like a palm-sized, multi-colored stegosaurus that poops out hundreds of copies of whatever its fed, mostly the incredibly powerful pearls that the Mül people harvest from the ocean. This makes the critter very valuable, and after a gun battle in an inter-dimensional shopping bazaar the creature is saved by cocky Major Valerian and his hottie sidekick, Sgt. Laureline. Their mission is to return it to government authorities on the City of a Thousand Planets, which, if I understood correctly, is what the current International Space Station evolves into after many centuries of alien contact. Things go wrong.

If that sounds interesting to you you’ll likely have a helluva time watching this visually spectacular but almost overwhelming picture. Every frame is truly a sight to see, inventive and astonishingly designed and reminiscent of the director’s own The Fifth Element but amped way up. That doesn’t necessarily make it a good movie, though, the characters aren’t terribly sympathetic or interesting, and some are downright annoying, including a trio of winged platypus looking things who seem to have a lot of information to sell. It’s too long as well, and I was kind of numb to it all by the time the end rolled around. I’m always happy to see amazing sci-fi visions, but it helps if there is something involving going on around them, which didn’t quite happen here.

It’s defiantly a see-it-on-a-big-screen visual experience though, but as the picture is dying lousy domestically as I type this you should probably get to it soon.

Posted by Jonathan Goeldner (Member # 4854) on 08-02-2017, 04:45 PM:

I really dug this movie. I thought it was a pretty interesting premise and I liked the cast. The 3D was all over the place, some scenes looked flat, but all the CGI effects scenes had tremendous depth.