Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017): based on the comic strip written by Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mezieres; written and directed by Luc Besson; starring Dane DeHaan (Major Valerian), Cara Delevinge (Sergeant Laureline), Rihanna (Bubble), and Clive Owen (Commander Arun Filitt):

Last summer's hot mess of a box-office bomb is this summer's... well, it's not a hot mess. It's not exactly good, either.

Valerian (also known as Valerian and Laureline) was an immensely popular French comic strip that began life in the late 1960's. It offered (emulating an earlier French strip, Barbarella) a combination of space opera and spies, a sort of Flash Gordon of Her Majesty's Secret Service. The strip was set hundreds of years in the future, but because of time-travel technology, agents Valerian (a guy) and Laureline (a woman) could operate throughout time and space so as to protect the future Earth alliance's interests.

The strip gradually elevated the spunky Laureline to the level of co-equal with Valerian. Indeed, in the story arc that writer-director Luc Besson based much of this movie upon, Ambassador of Shadows, Laureline is the protagonist while Valerian spends much of the story imprisoned off-panel.

No such luck here. Perversely, Besson's movie is a tone-deaf 'Love Story' in which Laureline and Valerian's relationship must end in the marriage Valerian wants because, you know, whatever. Of course, Valerian is a Major and Laureline is a Sergeant. No problem there! Valerian's courtship of Laureline throughout the movie runs the gamut from sexual harassment to assault to stalking. What larks! Of course Laureline, often incompetent (as is Valerian) falls for him in the end because LURV!

Of the other three major female characters, two are dead by the end of the movie. Whee!

Luc Besson professes to a life-long love of Valerian and Laureline. Boy, I'd hate to see the movie he would have made if he hated the source material!

There are sections of visual grandeur and cleverness. The movie comes out squarely against genocide, which is awesome. Rihanna is good as a shape-changing hooker with a heart of gold and the underwhelming name 'Bubble.' The score by Alexander Desplat is solid. 

The two leads are a bit perplexing. Dane DeHaan is utterly miscast as Valerian unless the point was to satirize the typical male action hero, in which case I guess he's perfectly cast. As Laureline, Cara Delevinge is dismayingly underweight in a bathing suit and dismaying gaunt and hollow-eyed throughout. She spends about two-thirds of the movie in a padded spacesuit. I don't normally worry about the health of an actress based solely on her physical appearance on-screen, but here, yeah -- it's frankly a bit creepy.

There's certainly enough here to be interesting, so long as one doesn't try to watch its 2 1/2 hours in one sitting. It may actually be better than Besson's over-praised The Fifth Element, and it's certainly better than his equally over-praised Lucy, which to me came across as some sort of racist parable, intentional or not. Lightly recommended.

The Collected Valerian Volume 1

Valerian Volume 1 (1967-69/ Collected 2017): written by Pierre Christin; illustrated by Jean-Claude Mezieres; translated by Jerome Saincantin: Before it was a blockbuster financial bomb of a movie directed by Luc Besson, Valerian was a beloved French comic strip ('Bande Dessinee' or 'BD' for short). It began in the late 1960's and influenced Besson and many others French and otherwise.

This volume collects the first three Valerian story arcs. Thankfully, as anyone can attest who lived through the awful English translations of major European comics appearing in Heavy Metal in the 1980's, the translation here is excellent.

Writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mezieres start off slowly, but by the third adventure ("The Empire of a Thousand Planets"), they've really hit their stride. Valerian is a science-fiction adventure set in the far future. Agent Valerian can travel through both time and space to protect his present day, and he does, recruiting medieval peasant Laureline in the first adventure. The first two adventures involve time travel and are intermittently enjoyable.

By the third adventure, Jean-Claude Mezieres's art has progressed immensely from the awkward cartooniness of the first two adventures. Things are still cartoony, but Valerian and Laureline no longer look like Keane kids. His visuals of alien planets and space battles also take a great leap forward. The third adventure is thoroughly engaging. It would have made a great movie. Too bad Besson chose to throw a bunch of Valerian adventures into a blender and then throw the result on the screen.

Christin's writing doesn't have as far to go as the art, but he has also improved markedly by the third adventure. One can see how the strip became beloved. It may have elements of the then-contemporary and the classic science-fiction strip, from Barberella back to Alex Raymond's beautifully illustrated Flash Gordon of the 1930's, but Valerian is also its own comic strip. BD, that is. Laureline and Valerian are hyper-competent without being boring, and the third adventure involves a pretty solid 'Twist' towards the end.

I don't know that I'll revisit Valerian. But I may -- it's certainly superior by the end of this first volume to an awful lot of science-fiction comics. And the second story arc demonstrates that even French comic-strip creators love them some Jerry Lewis. Recommended.

The Enemy of My Enemy

Riddick: written and directed by David Twohy, based on characters created by Jim and Ken Wheat; starring Vin Diesel (Riddick), Katee Sackhoff (Dahl), Jordi Molla (Santana) and Matt Nable (Johns) (2013): Vin Diesel loves his anti-social space fugitive very, very much. Thus this film, which he and writer-director Twohy basically financed themselves before finding a distributor.

After the bizarre bollocks that was 2004's Chronicles of Riddick, Riddick returns its titular anti-hero to the more familiar, monster-fighting ground of the first Riddick movie, Pitch Black. Diesel and Twohy also give Riddick lots of people to fight, with bounty hunters lining up on the planet upon which Riddick is stranded to collect the price on his head, and double the price if Riddick is dead.

It's all competent stuff, and the assorted CGI landscapes and monsters are entertaining enough. As in Pitch Black, we appear to have an ecosystem that produces an endless number of predators without there being any naturally occurring prey in the vicinity. Stupid planet! One's enjoyment of Riddick, which runs a bit long, mostly depends on how much one likes Vin Diesel. I like him fine, but I really wish he'd get better dialogue. Lightly recommended.

Thor: The Dark World: based on characters and concepts created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Jack Kirby, and Walt Simonson; written by Robert Rodat, Don Payne, Stephen McFeely, Christopher Markus, and Christopher Yost; directed by Alan Taylor; starring Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Natalie Portman (Jane Foster), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Anthony Hopkins (Odin), Christopher Eccleston (Malekith) and Kat Dennings (Darcy) (2013): Five credited writers and Odin knows how many more uncredited script doctors (including Joss Whedon, I'm pretty sure) manage to turn writer-artist Walt Simonson's terrific Thor comic-book Surtur Saga of the early 1980's into an ungodly mess.

The whole thing remains enjoyable because of the performances of its leads -- Hemsworth and Hiddleston in particular, squabbling as reluctant brothers-in-arms Thor and Loki. Unfortunately, the writers have dumped a giant crap-load of ridiculous exposition on top of the movie. Where originally one had a comic-book epic derived from Norse mythology's end-times and Thor's desperate attempts to prevent the last battle, now we have pseudo-scientific babble derived from too many viewings of The Lord of the Rings.

Yes, Tolkien. Because once upon a time, a bad dark lord made a thing which he could use to conquer the universe. But Thor's mighty ancestors defeated the Dark Lord. They didn't destroy the weapon, though -- they just buried it. Will someone find the weapon, thus drawing the dark lord into the light so he can grab the weapon for himself? Will we get a fiery, boat-riding Viking funeral for somebody? Will everybody speak in vaguely British accents? Why the hell do the dark elves all speak in a language that has to be sub-titled?

I hope Christopher Eccleston got paid a lot for the role of the dark elf Malekith, because between the whole not-speaking-English thing and the heavy slathering of make-up and prosthetics, he's completely unrecognizable. So, too, the actor who played Adubisi on Oz and Mr. Eko on Lost -- as Malekith's right-hand man, he was so unrecognizable that I only realized it was him while I was reading the credits.

But, you know, superhero fun! Whee! I actually think the ponderous, often nonsensical fake mythology expounded upon in Thor: The Dark World may be worse than the similar gunk we had dumped upon us in Man of Steel. Hemsworth is noble as Thor, anyway, and Tom Hiddleston actually invests Loki with something resembling human motivation. Someone get these guys a better movie. Lightly recommended.


The Family: based on the book by Tonino Benacquista, written by Luc Besson and Michael Caleo; starring Robert DeNiro (Giovanni), Michelle Pfeiffer (Maggie), Dianna Agron (Belle), John D'Leo (Warren) and Tommy Lee Jones (Robert Stansfield) (2013): Vicious black comedy from French action-auteur Luc Besson plays with audience expectations and sympathies. As a New York mobster in Witness Protection in Normandy, France (!) with his family because he ratted out his comrades, DeNiro is surprisingly loose and funny. He's also playing a near-psychopath, as are all the other actors playing his family.

What is for much of its length a seemingly jolly (albeit violent) comedy takes a surprising turn with about half-an-hour to go. I don't think it's entirely effective, but the violence does serve a thematic and cultural point. Recommended.