Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

Probably the biggest mistake you can do it about "Valerian and ...", induced maybe also by trailer, but probably more by your own subconscious, is to expect another "The 5th Element". Which I did...

There are several elements that might activate some nostalgic neurons - like the colorful future in a city filled with many and diverse races, but this is something common to a bunch of SciFi productions (from "Star Wars" to video games). Besides that, and some directorial patterns of Luc Besson, there's not much in common with the epic story of the taxi driver involved in saving the universe from the absolute Evil that hit the screens 20 years ago (omg... I'm old...). The story in brief for what we have here is the survival of a race from some planet, incidental victim during an interstellar war. There is some potential in the subject, but the way is handled is far from the amplitude/impact/whatever else we had in "The Fifth Element". Probably these two movies shouldn't be even compared. But the marketing challenged me (and of course my subconscious :)...).

To try to have a somehow more objective look on the movie, I can say it's relatively enjoyable. The subject has an apparently strong base in two characters, Valerian & Laureline, from a French comics series, agents of the human intergalactic government who must get to the core of the story above. And the core is well hidden, having some side elements that should make the main story more catchy. Should... because unfortunately you get the feeling that all the secondary threads are just for filling up the time because most of them are just superficially handled. I would say that even the main characters are bit shallow, but maybe it's just an impression propagated by the bunch of other insufficiently developed characters. For instance, we don't have a negative character... Or well, we d, but he's so absent (effectively speaking) that's almost not there at all. Yes, "the Evil" in "The 5th Element" was not really tangible, but you could feel that... with Mr. Zorg & whatever other minions it had. Somehow I doubt that in 2037 I'll remember about commander Filitt from the city of 1000 planets (oops, spoiler :P)... but let's get there first :)

Rating: 3 out of 5