Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets review

“Valerian and the city of a Thousand Planets” was supposed to be the comeback of European shlock-buster director Luc Besson. Having found lasting cult success with his sugary 1997 space opera “The Fifth Element,” which was also based on a French sci-fi comic book, many hoped that the mad scientist would get his mojo back with another high-budget passion project, after years of producing middling action programmers and throwaway children’s movies. While “Valerian” is too problematic and clunky to bring his style back into relevance, its gaudy visuals, cult aesthetics and zany idiosyncrasies are a welcome change of pace, even if the film as a whole is a garbled mess.

The plot centers on a young space cadet named Valerian (Dane DeHaan) who is sent on a mission to obtain a rainbow-colored, echidna-looking, Pokémon thing that sheds multiples of whatever you feed it, including pearls and diamonds. After he and his partner/lover Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevigne) manage to smuggle the creature from the sweaty palms of a gangster space-hog voiced by John Goodman, the couple are then ping-ponged from one disconnected set-piece to another upon an intergalactic colony of disparate cultures and species who have occupied segments of a man-made city-planet. What the couple don’t know, while they’re gallivanting around the City of a Thousand Planets with a singing jelly-fish named Bubble (Rihanna), is that they’re mission is part of a larger government cover-up that deals with a destruction of a planet of peaceful oceanic villagers that were the casualties of a human civil war.

One of this feature’s many weaknesses comes from Besson’s struggle to find the emotional or thematic anchor within this episodic jumble of ideas. The movie zips along and throws enough at you to keep you entertained, but we can never be sure where the dramatic tension lies within the story. The bad guy and his master plan is revealed far too early and pseudo love story between Dehaan and Delevigne is underdeveloped and completely unconvincing. It’s only in the final third of the film, when these threads are supposed to pay-off, that we realize that Besson was too busy world building and stylizing to lay a proper foundation for these failed story components.

I can’t stress enough how miscast the leads are. DeHaan’s shy, brooding demeanor and boyish frame is completely at odds with the character of Valerian, who's supposed to be a jockish, Han Solo style, arrogant every-man. Likewise, young model-turned-actress Delevigne is supposed to be a deceivingly ditzy but strong-willed female warrior, but her icy performance and stern eye-brow delivery never gives the character enough warmth to counter Valerian’s aloofness. Neither of them are blessed with particularly deep or revealing dialogue to help them fill out these roles and from the first scene their chirpy banter falls flat and their romantic chemistry is awkwardly non-existent.

Still, while I didn’t care for the plot or character’s, I have to appreciate the picture’s total commitment to its over-budgeted, everything and kitchen sink insanity. Divorced from the importance of narrative cohesion, the aesthetic framework around it pops like a drag show, a light-up pin-ball machine and Vegas stage show all in one. The tone is light and bouncy and the visuals, while obviously digitally manipulated, have a cartoonish quality that reinforces the movie’s celebratory artifice. “Valerian and the City of Thousand Planets” is, by most accounts, bad, but it’s also fun and unique and lacks just enough self-awareness to enjoy as a piece of psychedelic, sci-fi kitsch.

Grade: C-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/July-2017

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Valerian."

10 Cloverfield Lane

J.J. Abrams’ production company Bad Robot, which produced 2009’s “Cloverfield,” and “Super 8,” has made Abrams’ concept of the ‘mystery box’ a big part of the way it they tell their stories and an even bigger part of the way market their projects. “10 Cloverfield Lane” is a conceptual successor to the 2009 found-footage, monster-movie but it’s not necessarily a sequel. Of course Bad Robot sold the, as with many of its others, with a shroud of mystery, releasing a vague but enticing trailer. Luckily the film itself lives up to most of the intrigue of the trailer and though it only takes about 30 minutes before you realize this has nothing to do with the original “Cloverfield,” it settles in successfully as a contained thriller on its own... that is until it loses its nerve in a jarring and disjointed final sequence.

In keeping with the ‘mystery box’ narrative style we are introduced to our movie’s lead Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) as she is racing down the highways of rural America after initiating a bad breakup. On her way, she collides with a truck and is left for dead on the side of the road, where she is eventually rescued by an intense survivalist/conspiracy theorist named Howard (John Goodman). Michelle wakes up to finds herself in a hand-built bomb shelter where her captor/savior Howard insists that Armageddon has begun outside of the walls of their sanctuary and that she must live with him and his younger apprentice Emmet (John Gallagher Jr) until the air outside has become clear of nuclear fallout.

This would be a great premise for a bottle episode of anthology television shows like “The Twilight Zone,” “The Outer Limits” or even “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” The contained locations and the intimate cast focus the energy of the film on steady, deliberate scene direction and performances. All three of the leads are convincing in their parts – Winstead proves again that she can hold the camera’s attention and can bring both emotional heft and levity when it’s needed. Gallagher Jr works as a great foil that helps to settle the story’s tension with a general sense of everyman relatability. Goodman is given the license to ham it up and he chooses to use it, integrating many acting ticks into his creepy portrayal of a deeply paranoid and lonely control freak. Much of this is presented like a perversion of the American family archetype and in the background there’s only a hint of something more dangerous and otherworldly at stake. Unfortunately, the movie’s awkward landing doesn’t maintain the same kind of subtly and suggestion.

 First time director Dan Trachtenberg is able to keep the pot simmering for the most part but reported on-set rewrites lead to the movie’s downfall in a tonally jarring conclusion. I can’t give away what happens, but let’s just say that the human interactions happening inside of the seller is a hell of a lot more interesting than what’s apparently happening outside of it. Because the “Cloverfield” brand was slapped on this otherwise good thriller, Abrams’ made more effort to connect the two movies in ways that undercut this film’s deeper themes of fanaticism and the results of dangerously regressive gender dynamics. Like a pulpy cousin to last year’s Oscar-nominated “Room,” “10 Cloverfield Lane” wants to explore bigger ideas outside of the confines of its genre, but those ideas are ultimately trapped within a problematic rewrite.  

Even though the movie is hobbled by its misjudged ending, the merits of everything leading up to it can’t be ignored. As such, the film will sit alongside Steven Spielberg’s “A.I” and Danny Boyles “Sunshine” in the pantheon of sci-fi near-masterpieces that are marred by their last half hour.


Grade: B -

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2016 

Listen to more discussion about "10 Cloverfield Lane" on this week's Jabber and the Drone Podcast.

The Monuments Men review

                Originally slated as a late 2013 release, Grant Heslov and George Clooney’s World War II heist dramedy “The Monuments Men” was pushed to the early months of this year, which rarely says anything good about the studio’s faith in the project. But hey, how could you go wrong with a cast like this one, comprised of strongly-identifiable, older-aged actors like Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Matt Damon and Cooney himself. As it turns out, the same reverence towards these actors that recognized a yearning to see them together in the same flick might also be the same factor that placed them on an unreachably high pedestal, cased behind glass, where audiences are nervously asked to carefully observe the film from a safe distance.

                During the final stages of WW2, art historian Frank Stokes (Clooney) is asked to put together a scrappy team of other artists, architects and scholars to enter Nazi occupied France, in search of stolen paintings and sculptures from Europe’s past. The team is assembled quickly and even rushed into a military basic training camp before sweeping the bloodied battlegrounds, in search of the timeless artifacts. As the story progresses some of them are injured, others are killed and America’s international relations are placed in an opportunity for profound cooperation.

                Concurrently, James Granger (Matt Damon) is courting a French curator played by Cate Blanchet, who once worked under the Nazi’s before ending up in jail. Though Damon’s character is a married man their relationship skirts between professional and flirtatious, but is ultimately never resolved or rewarded by the film, much like everything else that happens.

                Heslov’s screenplay and Clooney’s direction is so guarded and safe that this movie eventually suffocates among all its narrative floatation devices.  You can’t help but notice every box being ticked as the story moves along: humorous fish-out-of-water scenes about old guys trying to fit into military life, check, secondary unrequited love story, check, sad moment when a one of the two soldiers who have spent the entire film learning to get along dies in the other’s arms, check. When these familiar beats pass by they don’t exactly ruin the overall goal of the picture, but they never really hit with the intended force of their formal purpose either.

                Cliché’s in a film like this are acceptable as long as the cover band can really jam out the classics, but unfortunately Clooney doesn’t mine his cliché’s for their inherent entertainment.  Because this movie is so focused on its message about the importance of preserving our humanity through art during times of political and economic upheaval—seriously, Clooney explicates this theme in not one but three separate lengthy speeches—everything else is treated lite and brief and frustratingly vague.  The film is never as funny as it should be and the cast members, as fabulous as they are, never seem to be on same page.

                With some thoughtful attention to period set-decoration, crisp cinematography, and a handful of notable scene-bits, I suppose “The Monuments Men” isn’t all bad.  It’s cute and old-fashioned in a somewhat obnoxiously knowing way, and it’s important and politically conscious in an absolutely obvious way. However, as an ensemble piece, the characters are dreadfully incidental and secondary to the plot’s strict sequencing of events. One might expect seasoned comedians like Murray and Goodman to spice things up with some much-needed improv or some creative line-readings but their direction is so edgeless and their scenes are so repetitively one-note that this movie only becomes a monument to the film it didn’t have the wherewithal to be.

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2014