Science Fiction

• 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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