- Title: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
- IMDb: link
Whether you are an optimist and view a glass of water as half-full or a pessimist and view it as half-empty, the fact is that there’s only water in half the glass. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a lot like that. Sure, half the glass is filled with terrific imagery and an impressively designed world. There are creatures, gadgets, and CGI aplenty. And even when the sci-fi plot gets a bit dicey it still has a cohesive plot (which is more than I can say for all films released this week). It would be easy to praise Valerian for only the things it does right and just as easy to slam it for all it gets wrong. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
The latest from director Luc Besson is based on the French comic series Valérian and Laureline. As in the comic, our story centers around a pair of spatio-temporal agents Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne). The script offers a glimpse into the contastly flirting partners’ lives aboard their ship and a mission that gets out of control before the film begins in earnest as the pair are called back to Alpa (the future version of the Intranational Space Station with thousands of aliens on board hurtling through space).
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Valerian and the Station of a Thousand Special EffectsRead More »
Based on the manga series of the same name, the live-action Hollywood Ghost in the Shell stars Scarlett Johansson (whose casting caused fan backlash). In a world where people are enhanced with cybornetic implants, Major is the first police officer whose brain (or ghost) is housed within the shell of the most advanced robot. While working for the corporation which built her, Major begins to learn disturbing secrets about them and herself that have little to do with keeping the peace. And, if any of this sounds familiar, it’s pretty much the plot of Robocop (without the humor).
