“I want only your name on my playlist.”

From Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.

After the International Space Station grew and grew to include countless countries from Earth and thousands of alien species, it was renamed Alpha Station and moved deep into space.  Valerian (Dane Dehaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevigne) are two agents in the federation responsible for keeping the peace across the galaxy.  When a routine mission goes wrong, Valerian and Laureline are able to salvage the mission, but that is only the start of their troubles.  There is a mysterious radioactive mass growing in the center of the Alpha Station and it seems to be somehow connected to a long-ago destroyed planet and the small Converter animal that they retrieved on their mission.  The two agents are tasked with protecting their commander (Clive Owen) as he rallies the committee to protect the Converter and find the ones responsible for the radioactive mass; this new mission will introduce them to the whole station and a wide variety of the aliens aboard.

Visually, this movie is spectacular. The special effects are brilliant and gorgeous, with massively impressive scene after scene.  Dehaan is hard to connect with; his character is written very dry with bits of cockiness, recklessness, and seemingly out-of-character genuineness mixed together.  Delevigne also has a very dry humor, but it is consistently so and it works for her character.  However, their combined dryness is almost unbearable in some early scenes.  A generous helping of comedic moments help to spice up the movie, but the romantic “tension” between Laureline and Valerian is the most annoying aspect of the movie.  The story had lots of potential, but fell short in a way that is almost hard to identify exactly why.  This is not to say that it’s a terrible movie, because it is definitely fun to watch when you want a movie to zone out to.  Ultimately, Valerian is a movie that is disappointing for viewers once you realize all that it could have been.

| Rated: PG-13 | Running Time: 137 minutes |Genre: sci-fi/action |

||Family Viewing||Cursing: 1 of 10|Nudity: 2 of 10|Sexuality: 3 of 10|Gore: 4 of 10

|AVAILABLE FOR HOME VIEWING|