Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

[ElieB 238]

It's Friday, there's a bunch of new movies out but I'm too tired from the work week to focus on anything good so my friend and I say luc besson space madness? Ok that should be entertainingly bad at least. and I fucking love scifi AND bad movies.

 

My friend and I walked out, like, 15 to 20 minutes from the end of the movie. Cause we just couldn't take anymore. It's so disorienting, random, meaningless, disjointed, boring and cliched. Might have been racist too. Script is fucking brutal, there's no antagonist, you'll hate the protagonists, you'll never know where you are and why you're there, the soundtrack will put you too sleep, you'll be upset by a 10 min scene fetishizing some primitive pixie species of aliens. OMG by the time Rhianna shows up in a 5 min shape-shifting burlesque scene I was losing it. and then she actually stick around for a half hour delivering terrible lines?? Fuuuuuuuck this movie. My whole experience was a melange of boredom, disorientation and confusion. NOT a fun combination.

 

It's maybe his worst film yet.

No, definitely is...

 

Don't actually want an episode about this but I would enjoy June trying to understand this piece of trash.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPeqNTqZNN0

[IMAHUGEHDTGMFAN 1837]

Let's get a double Luc Besson episode going and do "Lucy" too

[ElieB 238]

Let's get a double Luc Besson episode going and do "Lucy" too

 

Besson has definitely earned a double bill. Don't know how hes escaped the HDTGM treatment altogether...

[IMAHUGEHDTGMFAN 1837]

 

Besson has definitely earned a double bill. Don't know how hes escaped the HDTGM treatment altogether...

 

I know right???

 

Thank you for the heads up though, ElieB...

 

 

 

And I'm so sorry that you & your friend can't get your money and time back just like I can't for "Lucy" :S

[muttnik 476]

I still can't get over how much Dane and Cara look like siblings and yet they're supposed to be lovers. Gag.

[Gritsmas Vegetables 0]

I DO want this episode to be made! The exposition via dialogue was some of the worst I've ever heard. No idea who the humans we're fighting in the epic battle that they call back to but I guess that's not important or anything. Why are lower ranked officers ordering around the generals exactly? Absolutely nothing made sense in this movie.

 

This movie also has some back story to how it got financed which would be interesting to delve into. And it's another example of a big writer/director spending years trying to get his dream movie made and it turns out to be absolute garbage.

[ElieB 238]

When you call out a really shitty movie on opening weekend and HDTGM decides to roast it by its dvd release:

 

 

 

Hopefully this grows into a double feature with Lucy, right Ⓜⓐⓧⓘⓜⓘⓛⓘⓐⓝⓞ??

[jimkiler 84]

Was the actor playing Valerian trying to impersonate Keanu Reeves? I thought of that every time he talked.

[Quasar Sniffer 4174]

The more distance I get from this movie, as I saw it in theaters because of how much I love Fifth Element (and because I'm a dumb sucker), the more it pisses me off. It could have been this imaginative, if manic and jumbled, sci-fi masterpiece, but instead it's just a boring, obscenely expensive mess with uncharismatic leads. Then you get Rihanna and Ethan Hawke in one sequence and they ooze charisma and the exact right amount of enthusiastic insanity, and then you never see those characters again. Why couldn't the movie have been about THEM?

[Snake 165]

I loved Valerian referring to himself as a bad boy lady killer when he's this scrawny little dork

[potsmaster 36]

Came on to recommend this movie as well. This one really should put Luc Besson in writing jail. I was really excited for it but it was total garbage. It would also fit perfectly into Paul's theory that any time a director tries to get his or her "passion project" completed after years of planning it out, it almost always fails tremendously.

 

I'd love to hear a supercut of every time Laureline says "Valerian!" It's gotta be 50+.

 

Also, having June and Jessica St Clair watch this would be amazing. They'd likely hit some sort of critical mass of sick and angry that could, in all likelihood, destroy all of Los Angeles.

[taylor anne photo 11311]

You're in luck, potsmaster. This was covered on a Stitcher Premium episode from the pee cast blast or whatever that little festival was called lol.

[Ofcoursemyhorse 1043]

The casting of this movie really is unfortunate. Bruce Willis had exactly zero fucking charisma in The Fifth Element, the reason it ended up working despite the lead being as captivating as a loaf of bread is that everyone else in the movie was chewing all the scenery all the time. Milla Jovanich, Gary Oldman, Chris Tucker, Tiny Lister, etc. were all behaving like lunatics the entire movie which made it alot of fun despite how nonsensical both the plot and dialogue were.

 

This movie felt like everyone was Bruce Willis. It also makes me sad for Clive Owen, everyone should watch Children of Men and remember he's capable of so much more.

[potsmaster 36]

Definitely agree that the casting was atrocious. Both of the leads seemed to be too young, and by that I mean they played the roles as if they were 14. It was like watching a big budget, sci-fi action reboot of Flowers in the Attic. The will-they-won't-they didn't work at all and I don't think any viewer could or would ever care if they did or not. Valerian came off more as a creepy, all-too-forward sexual-harassing stalker than a sincere romantic lead with a redemption story.

 

Your Fifth Element comparison is pretty spot on, but it's like both of the leads were Bruce Willis in Hudson Hawk. His performance in Fifth Element was energetic and inspired in comparison. I think Clive Owen's performance in the movie was decent, considering what he was given to work with. He chewed up the scenery A TON, very akin to Gary Oldman in Fifth Element. I think he was just working with a totally shit script and acting across some really terrible partners.

 

The thing about this movie that made me the most angry was that it had such amazing potential to be a really amazing sci-fi adventure, if the story was just contained and kept relatively simple. Instead Luc Besson (who is already a pretty lousy writer) tried to cram in an entire universe and seemingly 5 or 6 story-lines in a single film. Because he was such a fan, he got the misguided idea that he can bring a large chunk of a fairly expansive series of books all into 2.5 hours of film.

[potsmaster 36]

You're in luck, potsmaster. This was covered on a Stitcher Premium episode from the pee cast blast or whatever that little festival was called lol.

 

Oh shit! I didn't realize this! I just signed up for Stitcher premium recently and I've only scratched the surface of a long podcast backlog after a very long time of not being able to consume them very much. Thanks for the tip! I feel really dumb now! Not that I don't feel really dumb a lot of the time.