Spaced: VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets blasts off with more invention in one sequence than many blockbusters manage in their entire runtime. So chockablock with dazzling gee-whiz whiz-bang sci-fi detail and swooping techno-swashbuckling space opera derring-do, it’s an overload of pulp eye candy. Spaceships soar through the skies, asteroids pelt planets, energy pulses from being to being, viewscreens and robots light up with commands, a multitude of creatures jostle side by side in a universe cascading every direction in and out of the colorful 3D frame, and a hero and heroine pose in rippling red-blooded choreography. Too bad the movie slowly runs out of steam, hitting its peak around the midpoint, then slowly dragging to an underwhelming climax, each sequence a little less involving than the last. But, goodness gracious, how eye-boggling the film is from top to bottom and beginning to end, worth marveling at even after the rote plot and clunky dialogue’s throwback novelty appeal wears off. What preposterously dorky-cool retro-future space serial silliness! It’s good enough to make me wish for a whole bunch more of these, a big, glowing, fully-inhabited fantasy universe worth exploring. After all, marry the look and movement to a tighter, wittier script consistently involving throughout, and you’d really have something here.

Springing from the mind of French trash-master Luc Besson, inspired by a classic French comic book, the writer-director steers into his strengths. Always a tonal eccentric with a brilliant design sense, he’s made a career out of stretching and pulling at genre conceits in unexpected ways. His films aren’t always worthwhile enterprises – he’s made more than his fair share of clunkers – but there’s an earnest appeal to his attempts. Valerian, like Besson’s best films – from the similarly colorful sci-fi Fifth Element to hallucinogenic super-lady actioner Lucy – is built around enjoyable visual tricks and hurtling energy. Familiar in the best sense of the word, here’s a gleaming CG space movie built around geometric ships, rocket suits, laser guns, and glowing screens, and with striking figures – our leads with features more delicate and movements more fluid than we usually get out of stock brutes and babes – flying and posing in elaborately constructed phoniness and quick, chaotic, episodic cliff-hangers. Here we follow interplanetary secret agents Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne), a flirtatious working partnership played with low-chemistry, flat-footed, dopey love/hate obviousness, as they get pulled into a conspiracy involving duplicitous colleagues, secret redacted information, and a bevy of nasty underworld characters on sidetracks and side quests. 

Our heroes’ journey begins in an action sequence with the movie’s coolest idea – an inter-dimensional bazaar where a stakeout turns into a chase sequence that phases in and out of different planes of reality, an inventive transporting genre idea – before returning to Alpha base, where a thousand planets have built a hodgepodge floating city in deep space. They’re meant to be working together in harmony, but amidst the bulkheads and geospheres and capsules of this galactic Zootopia, darkness grows. This leads to Valerian and Laureline’s encounters with their stern commanding officers (Clive Owen, Kris Wu, and Herbie Hancock), heartless robots, a ruthless alien gangster (John Goodman), gossiping duck-billed beings, massive aquatic beasts, memory-unlocking jellyfish, a sexy shapeshifting blob (Rihanna) and her bejeweled cowboy pimp (Ethan Hawke), a tiny rodent that poops magic pearls, and an ethereal race of doomed blue androgynous stowaways (Elizabeth Debicki and others). Through it all, Besson keeps his images spinning with elaborate expensive detail. It’s like the best sci-fi paperback cover paintings you’ve never seen. He had a huge budget and a good imagination and is intent on displaying as much as he can. The heroes crash through dazzlingly rendered visual delights, lingering mere minutes or even seconds in environments so rich with possibility that you could set up shop in just one for an entire feature. But we’re always rushing to the next episode, the next dramatic escape, the next conflict in an unfolding mystery. By the time the plot forces itself to congeal and resolve, petering out in rote villain monologues and tedious flashback explanations, it’s not only with the sad sense of a narrative running out of steam, but with the deflating knowledge that that’s how we’ll have to leave this memorable world.

Quick Look: TRUST

If Trust is not the worst movie of the year so far, and it’s not, it’s certainly one of the queasiest. I could imagine a good version of a movie about a young teen girl seduced by an online stranger who then rapes her and throws her, and her family’s, life into emotional overdrive. This is not that movie. Not at all. It’s a sick vortex of awful hysterics and kids-these-days grumbling that plays as overblown and, worse, fake. It even sucks in usually dependable actors like Clive Owen, Catherine Keener, and Viola Davis. Young Liana Liberato, as the victim, is quite good as well, but the film isn't up to the level of the cast. I’m not expecting a movie like this to have easy resolution, or resolution at all for that matter, but I wish director David Schwimmer and writers Andy Bellin and Robert Festinger could have had something of interest to add to a timely discussion. Instead, they have this manipulative, pat tripe masquerading as a Very Serious Statement. It’s clunky, formulaic, and uses online culture as nothing more than an overwhelming source of paranoia. What a slimy well-meaning picture. Here’s a review in two onomatopoeias: Yuck and Ugh.  It’s so purposelessly cruel to its characters and its audience that the name of the girl’s school, New Trier High School, is an unfortunate coincidence.

Quick Look: The Boys Are Back (2009)

Clive Owen is definitely a movie star. If you haven’t figured that out from his excellent performances and distinctive persona on display in films as varied as Children of Men, Sin City, Inside Man, The International, and Duplicity, you’ll discover it here in The Boys Are Back, not because this is a great movie, or even a good one, but because his mere presence illuminates an otherwise dull endeavor. It’s a based-on-a-true-story teary-eyed tale of a widower who has to juggle his sports-writer career with raising his two sons. That’s rich material and easily emotional, but that’s precisely why it fails. Director Scott Hicks, who has done excellent work in the past and will hopefully do so again, doesn’t strive to reach any emotion beyond that which is already hanging so low, the branch has snapped off of the tree. Every scene is slathered in sentimentality, though the shots themselves sometimes achieve a kind of beauty denied the film as a whole. The script, by Allan Cubitt, is merely competent. It’s a good thing then, that Owen, and the two young guys who play the sons (George MacKay and Nicholas McAnulty), are such sharp, appealing performers. Together they almost make the movie better than the script ultimately allows.

Duplicity (2009)

I would never have guessed that behind the bland ads and a blander poster, that Duplicity could actually be very good. I’m so happy that it’s more than very good: this is a smart, stylish, and witty movie that is a total frothy delight from beginning to end, the best froth I’ve seen in a while and the most satisfyingly twist-filled plot since, well, writer-director Tony Gilroy’s last movie (one of my favorites of 2007), Michael Clayton.

Duplicity is like that film in a major key, lighter, bouncier, sunnier, a comedy thriller about corporate espionage without a gun fight or car chase in sight. It’s an endlessly entertaining heist film (yes, that tired genre) as it continually backs up to fill us in on the con while moving forward to reveal how the con is more complicated than we think. The filmmakers delight in revealing their secrets to us, and I took delight in it as well, as the frame literally breaks apart and slides into the past then slowly shrinks back into the future to send us into even more twists. These are the kind of genuinely surprising twists that make me alternately gasp and chuckle, not the kind that appear simply because the gears of the plot require it of them.

The dialogue spits and flips out of the actor’s mouths so effortlessly, so wittily, I’ll bet it could often work just as well as a radio play. But that would rob the film of its beautiful imagery, its fun split-screen moments, and the great visages of its stars. Julia Roberts’s face is harsher now than it once was but she’s settling into a more mature look, still a star up there, comfortable in her own skin, larger than life, and she’s having a blast. So is Clive Owen, pitch-perfect as always, but its startling after so many years of grim and grimmer stories to see him crack a smile. He’s having fun too. These are capital-S stars, the kind that help guide a smart, stylish movie to an even better place by their sheer luminosity. They play ex-spies, ex-maybe lovers, and maybe also examining the start of a beautiful friendship. They’re running a con game, and that’s all I should say. Are they running one con in tandem or two at once? Are they conning each other or just corporate America? What’s the difference between a hand cream and a lotion? Why does the last question matter (as it so obviously does)? I won’t say. There's too much fun to be had finding out.

And then there’s a great supporting cast, the best of which is Paul Giamatti. Boy, it’s good to see him again, and in such a fun and funny role, twisting his face up in all-too-recognizable displays of corporate arrogance. Tom Wilkinson’s here too, in a mostly one-note role as an also recognizable corporate type: the self-satisfied windbag, although he gets a great monologue about ancient fire and also gets to explain one of the movie’s best twists. Together the two great men square off over the opening credits in an extremely slow-mo corporate fisticuffs that brings the house down.

What a pure entertainment; it’s sleek and shiny, a beautiful pristine bliss machine. I loved every minute of it as it sizzles with a love of storytelling. And why shouldn’t it, when Gilroy has such a fun, satisfying story to tell. This is a classy and classical film that, with a few changes, – they’d have to be secretly married, their relations would be more implied, the tech much lower – could pass for a film of the forties or fifties, it’s so cleanly charming with effortless expert craftsmanship (who’d play the leads? I’m thinking Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell).

A film that could have stepped wrong so often didn’t and by the end, when I realized Gilroy pulled it off, I was pleasantly surprised, no, pleasantly overjoyed. This is an effortlessly delightful movie, the best excuse for an ear-to-ear grin in these troubled times of pre-summer multiplex famine and economic drought. This is a roof-raising crowd-pleaser in the best sense. The kind of movie with generous humor and a complicated but comprehensible script that flies forward trusting the audience to keep pace. As Gilroy holds the last shot longer than expected (not unlike in Clayton) he allows the plot to settle in along with the full satisfaction of having seen a movie.