Over the course of three or four hundred years, the International Space Station changes as hundreds or thousands of aliens dock and never leave. We have a cute montage of humans greeting new visitors to the station, with each race being a little more alien than the last. We watch as a race of uber peaceful aliens living on the planet Tahiti Screen Saver go about their day doing a number of bizarre and incomprehensible things. Then they watch helplessly as wreckage from a battle raging in close proximity to the planet rain down on their perfect and defenseless paradise.
We then shift over to a couple of humans chilling on a beach of their own. These are sort of the heroes of the story, if you can call any of these people heroes. They are soldiers in some future military and we watch as they proceed to commit murder and mayhem for the rest of the film.
This is definitely a turn your brain off at the door movie.
Valerian is a visually stunning film. There are a lot of way cool effects and funny scenes. But none of it looks even remotely real. This is like one of those old school Disney films where they mixed live action and cartoons.
Did I mention none of it makes any sense?
The peaceful primitive aliens know to hide in a downed spaceship as their world is destroyed around them. The ship seems to have had no original crew and the sun loving tall blue aliens quickly learn all they need to know to pilot the ship and speak a gazillion languages.
At one point our hero destroys several walls and I’d have to guess, killed a lot of the aliens who need special environments to live. At another point he is worried about creating a diplomatic incident. He then murders the leader of those people. To be fair, the leader did want to eat his girlfriend’s brain, but this is never explained either.
In the end it’s all about a war crime, but a war crime that is never explained. Why was this battle taking place over this tropical paradise of a planet? Who where they fighting? What was so special about the weapons they used?
And so on and so forth.
Valerian was pretty, but dumb.
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