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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
2017 · Film · 137 min
Directed by Luc Besson
AdventureScience FictionAction
In the 28th century, Valerian and Laureline are special operatives charged with keeping order throughout the human territories. On assignment from the Minister of Defense, the two undertake a mission to Alpha, an ever-expanding metropolis where species from across the universe have converged over centuries to share knowledge, intelligence, and cultures. At the center of Alpha is a mysterious dark force which threatens the peaceful existence of the City of a Thousand Planets, and Valerian and Laureline must race to identify the menace and safeguard not just Alpha, but the future of the universe.
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8 comments on Hacker News
The Fifth Element and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets are widely considered to share a thematic and stylistic universe, with similar aesthetic influences. There are shared elements (ha!) and aesthetics, with Valerian even featuring a shop called "Korbens" as an easter egg to The Fifth Element.
Unfortunately the movie doesn't do it for me, the 90s were a better time.
Once CGI became good storytelling and creativity took a backseat in Hollywood.
This is exactly what happens in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.. the opening to that movie is fantastic. The rest, well I don't remember so it must have been forgettable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0FX8sd1uVo
It would be very sad if this wasn't one of the possible fates of ISS.
This battle has already been raging in the film industry for decades. Technically, an independent film is anything financed independently of the major film distributors. This includes some very expensive effects-driven movies like Luc Besson's Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, which makes this definition not particularly useful to the average moviegoer.
So instead most people stick to a more loosely defined colloquial definition, rooted more in a film's budget and artistic aspirations, that often includes "indie-like" films from notable indie filmmakers, but financed directly by one of the major studios.
I haven't seen these mentioned yet: Galaxy Quest, The Fifth Element, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Oblivion, Tron: Legacy, Mission to Mars, Pacific Rim, Bicentennial Man, Alita: Battle Angel (some of these may be PG-13)
Treasure Planet and Titan A.E. are also good animated movies, although Treasure Planet is more science-fantasy.
I'd also second Back to the Future, Contact, Interstellar, Gattaca, October Sky
> The nearest thing you might find today .. maybe Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets? Luc Besson has some of the same pulp influences.
Yes. Valérian is on the mainstream side of that 1980s sci-fi movement. One of the authors also was an artist for the Fifh Element. And a heavy influence on George Lucas (several Star Wars scenes are straight out of Valérian).
> Maybe we just skip the middle steps and have the AI make the film.
Several of these artists would have loved to have AIs to use back in the day. Very fitting in the whole artistic project.
It's extremely difficult to make new "cult" cinema deliberately; this kind of thing (especially the psychadelia influences) is simply out of style, and middle-budget pictures are vanishing.
The nearest thing you might find today .. maybe Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets? Luc Besson has some of the same pulp influences.
Maybe we just skip the middle steps and have the AI make the film.
Although RT tends to produce false positives for me, it is a reasonably reliable filter. If Hollywood is suffering, I'd look to the quality of its product.
For example, marvel civil war is a false positive (for me). When I watch it, I can't get past the clipped, contrived dialogue, close-ups on faces, ham-fisted plots, inconceivably stupid action, schizophrenic scene changes, plastic cgi, and awkward obviously demographically targeted identity fantasies.
But the movie Valerian and the city of a thousand planets, which was panned on RT, was in almost every way actually objectively worse than its well rated marvel counterpart. It was so bad it made me fill physically ill.
Through accumulated experience, I've found that RT, for me, is a reasonable predictor of "a very bad time." And even if its high ratings don't consistently predict a good time, they do predict relative enjoyability well.
I've had so many awful movie going experiences over the last twenty years of adulthood that I've more or less stopped going. I have a very hard time blaming a rating system. I'd look instead to very shallow, implausible scripting (punchy one-liners, hollow melodrama), lackluster cinematography (zoomed in facials, schizophrenic shot switching), repetitive and/or assinine plots (corporations are eeevil), weird editing and incoherent writing (random, poorly interjected side stories or comedy, bizarre scene shifts, prolonged melodrama), boring, implausible, drawn out action (ugh), predictable demographically targeted identity fantasies, and I don't know, the list goes on.
I know beyond certainty that I'm not the target audience, but I can't help but think people are increasingly demanding movies that repay rather than punish sustained attention, and I can't help but think that these qualities passively improve the commercial value of the Hollywood product.
Edit: grammar, removed repetition.
> I've read elsewhere on the Internet that Dune the novel actually is an inspiration for the Star Wars universe
A greater inspiration is the comic series Valerian and Laureline [1]. Lucas pumped not just the characters and spaceships (yes, the Millenium Falcon comes from there) but also the atmosphere of Far West casual fun adventure and creativity bordering on the fantasy.
I look forward to reading articles about how Valerian copied Star Wars when the movie comes out [2].
Note the years the series was written and do not read the last few if you are not used to the way authors of that era dared to wrap up their stories.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val%C3%A9rian_and_Laureline
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerian_and_the_City_of_a_Thousand_Planets