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Thursday, May 3, 2018

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets


Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Official Trailer - Teaser (2017) - Movie
I watched it on Amazon Prime. It's available on YouTube for $5.

It's about equal parts silly, amazing, and fantastic. You get dragged through a zillion different worlds (ok, maybe only a couple of dozen, not a zillion), but you only get to spend a few seconds there and then you get drug off to someplace new. And some of these places are fantastic. The giant tank of water that is home to a bunch of dinosaur-size creatures. They're pretty ugly. Reminded me of fleas for some reason. Dinosaur-size fleas, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

It's silly because we've got the whole boy-girl relationship thing front and center. It's silly because they only get a few seconds to work on that relationship before another dinosaur-sized flea interrupts their deliberations. To sum it up, the boy is a typical male expecting to score with any female he sets his sights on. The girl is a monument to civilization, holding out for marriage and commitment.

It's amazing because of the technology that the movie makers imagined. One is the scale of things. Since there is no gravity in orbit, it should be very easy to build enormous structures. There might be a problem with getting the materials you need, but once you have a factory that can turn an asteroid into girders it ought to be a piece of cake.

It's silly because it's got all your standard tropes. It's got your corrupt government autocrat committing genocide against the graceful, peaceful natives of a primitive planet, who never-the-less manage to not only master our technology but better it. It's even got the infamous garbage chute scene.

It's fantastic because they make an attempt to imagine what technology might be able to accomplish in the next few hundred years. They are using some high-tech gadgets that are like something straight out of science fiction. Kind of like of some the gadgets we use now (like cell phones and GPS) that were totally science fiction not all that long ago.

It's amazing because Luc Besson let his imagination run wild. Luc also did The Fifth Element.

1 comment:

game for kids said...

The two lead characters lack any depth or acting... I realize that it’s a sci-fi film but it’s just so horrendous I had to stop the film a couple of times, walk away, and come back to it because it was so bad.... ugh... it’s like a car crash on a highway and you have to finish getting through it as much as you hate it.
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