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This looks like a massive budget sci-fi adventure, I vaguely remember hearing the name of it but wasn't tempted to go see it at the cinema. I wonder if the advertising people did a good enough job pushing it. It's based on a series of French science fiction comics called Valerian and Laureline which I have not heard of previously. Apparently producer Luc Besson has been wanting to make this movie for years even considering it way back in 1997 when he was working on The Fifth Element.
As the film starts we see the scope of the civilisations involved in the story during a starting sequence where we see beings from many species greeting and shaking hands with each other as they create a massive, planet sized space base, Alpha Station in the Earth's orbit. Eventually they become a danger to Earth so are set adrift to govern themselves. This is the City of a Thousand Planets, Valerian is a young Major in their security forces. He and his partner Sergeant Laureline start the film on a mission on a planet to capture a stolen converter, a small dragon like creature, the last of it's kind, that appears to poop out multiple replicas of whatever it eats! It is being sold on the black market by some previous residents of the planet Mül which was destroyed 30 years ago. We saw their homeworld get destroyed before the introduction of the title characters, an event that Valerian either dreamed or received a psychic flash about. He recognises them from his dream but when the mission goes pear-shaped he has to get out quickly before he can question them.
After a narrow escape they arrive back on Alpha Base to be faced with two threats, firstly a strange techno cancer has infected the base threatening to destroy it and secondly ruthless forces want the last converter and will go to extreme lengths to get it. The two appear to be connected as a group of Mül show up and kidnap the commander.
There are mysteries and intrigue around what happened to the Mül planet and what they are after that gets the partners into a lot of scrapes during the course of this 2 hour 20 minute movie.
The real star of this movie is the special effects and the imagination at work to create the many creatures and areas of the ship that we see. There are some scenes that almost leave you agog at the amount of detail that went into them. The early mission scene for example is in a kind of virtual reality market place so we see a fight/escape scene that exists in seemingly 2 different dimensions at once. Another seen sees a chase through Alpha Base that passes through a number of regions all vastly different to each other. This movie had a massive budget and it shows, although it apparently ended up a bit of a box office failure so I'm not sure if they'll ever be any sequels.
The action is top-notch and the story is passable, the only negative points is that the characters are perhaps a tad flat and lacking charisma, it's definitely worth a look just for the cool visuals.
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This looks like a massive budget sci-fi adventure, I vaguely remember hearing the name of it but wasn't tempted to go see it at the cinema. I wonder if the advertising people did a good enough job pushing it. It's based on a series of French science fiction comics called Valerian and Laureline which I have not heard of previously. Apparently producer Luc Besson has been wanting to make this movie for years even considering it way back in 1997 when he was working on The Fifth Element.
As the film starts we see the scope of the civilisations involved in the story during a starting sequence where we see beings from many species greeting and shaking hands with each other as they create a massive, planet sized space base, Alpha Station in the Earth's orbit. Eventually they become a danger to Earth so are set adrift to govern themselves. This is the City of a Thousand Planets, Valerian is a young Major in their security forces. He and his partner Sergeant Laureline start the film on a mission on a planet to capture a stolen converter, a small dragon like creature, the last of it's kind, that appears to poop out multiple replicas of whatever it eats! It is being sold on the black market by some previous residents of the planet Mül which was destroyed 30 years ago. We saw their homeworld get destroyed before the introduction of the title characters, an event that Valerian either dreamed or received a psychic flash about. He recognises them from his dream but when the mission goes pear-shaped he has to get out quickly before he can question them.
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| Just one of the friendly monsters we see in this movie |
After a narrow escape they arrive back on Alpha Base to be faced with two threats, firstly a strange techno cancer has infected the base threatening to destroy it and secondly ruthless forces want the last converter and will go to extreme lengths to get it. The two appear to be connected as a group of Mül show up and kidnap the commander.
There are mysteries and intrigue around what happened to the Mül planet and what they are after that gets the partners into a lot of scrapes during the course of this 2 hour 20 minute movie.
The real star of this movie is the special effects and the imagination at work to create the many creatures and areas of the ship that we see. There are some scenes that almost leave you agog at the amount of detail that went into them. The early mission scene for example is in a kind of virtual reality market place so we see a fight/escape scene that exists in seemingly 2 different dimensions at once. Another seen sees a chase through Alpha Base that passes through a number of regions all vastly different to each other. This movie had a massive budget and it shows, although it apparently ended up a bit of a box office failure so I'm not sure if they'll ever be any sequels.
The action is top-notch and the story is passable, the only negative points is that the characters are perhaps a tad flat and lacking charisma, it's definitely worth a look just for the cool visuals.
*********************************************
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