She’s in full Fosse drag: the bowler hat, the fishnets, the body-hugging black leotard, and the body rolls while she dances on a chair.īubble’s gift, though, is that she’s a shapeshifter, so cue the supercut of Rihanna living out all your pubescent fetishes: sexy nurse, contortionist, stripper, Catholic school girl, French maid, roller girl, Catwoman dominatrix. We meet Bubble as she begins to dance for Valerian. Anne Hathaway will watch this performance and go, “A bit much, no?” No. It seems that everyone forgot to tell Rihanna they weren’t going to bother with the whole acting thing in this film, because she goes full Fantine with this role. She plays Bubble (!) a dancer at a seedy space brothel with the misfortune of being presided over by Ethan Hawke in a cowboy hat after taking too much Adderall. It’s roughly 80 minutes into this acid trip that Rihanna finally arrives, and it will be roughly 80 years before I stop talking about her performance. It is the greatest 10 minutes of cinema this entire summer. Logic is an afterthought, with most action sequences taking on a video game-like convenience in which Valerian magically summons technological tricks, skills, and super powers to get him out of jams.īut where the juvenile scripting is at its peak is in this Rihanna-centric interlude that takes a nonsensical 10-ish minute break from the plot to sexualize the pop star before dismissing her character entirely. Hell, there’s even a trio of platypus-bat-like swindlers who are played as Three Stooges-esque comic relief, but veer more closely to Jar Jar Binks problematic territory. There’s the direct cribbing from the Star Wars films: the requisite adrenaline-pumping aircraft chase, the intergalactic meetings, the Jabba the Hut stand-in, Laureline’s heroine-to-harlot interlude, the corrupt commander, the Han-Leia will-they/won’t-they romance, and a bunch of cute little aliens. (Besson himself takes full screenplay credit.) Honestly, that’s both its biggest attribute and flaw. I understand that Valerian is based on a cherished comic book series, but as events unfold it’s hard to shake the notion that it’s a screenplay concocted by sugar-overdosing 12-year-old boys at a sleepover party. Intergalactic war is nearly waged over this aardvark with calcite-induced IBS. The key to regenerating their home is-and you can’t make this up-an adorable creature, some kind of cross between an aardvark, lizard, and kitten, that literally poops pearls. The walking sperm come from a planet that thrived on pearls (or something like that), but was wiped out as collateral damage to human war. But, basically, the majestic city of Alpha, a utopian metropolis in which species from across the universe share brainpower and culture for the greater good, is under attack by a sperm-looking alien race seeking revenge on Clive Owen, whose performance is so blustery you’ll need a windbreaker to watch his scenes. This plot is abandoned so frequently as the film becomes distracted by its own manifested shiny things-look, there’s Rihanna!-that it’s almost pointless to recap. It’s exhausting-they read so young it’s like teenagers impersonating sexual chemistry for a high school play-and ceaseless as the two become entangled in the film’s convoluted plot. He’s the Han, brutishly in love with her but kind of a cad she’s the Leia, exasperated and too intelligent for his shenanigans, but obviously harboring a crush. They have a screwball His Girl Friday-like banter. The first genius move from deranged screenwriter-director Luc Besson ( Lucy, The Fifth Element) is to cast the three Hollywood actors who most look like aliens to star in his sci-fi caper/love story/cautionary tale: Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, and the aforementioned badgalriri, though it’s only the singing extraterrestrial beauty who actually plays an alien in the film.ĭeHaan and Delevingne are commanders Valerian and Laureline, special operatives more than 700 years in the future who are charged with maintaining order throughout the human territories in a now seemingly boundless universe rife with all kinds of species a $180 million special effects budget can provide you. I’m leaning toward the latter because, as previously mentioned, there is Rihanna. Plus, there’s Rihanna.įriends, I don’t know if this is the single worst film I have ever seen or if I should tell you to quit your job and spend the next week watching it in theaters on loop. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is like Star Wars and Avatar had a baby, that baby grew up, took mushrooms, and thought life was a video game.
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