4-Color to 35-Millimeter: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Luc Besson takes a visually stunning, delightfully written series of comics stories, “Valérian et Laureline,” and turns them into a visually stunning, ineptly written (and horrendously acted) movie. The great superhero movie rewatch slogs through Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.

An excerpt:

The script honestly feels like it wandered in from 1967, when the comic debuted, from the sexism to the simplistic dialogue to the clunky exposition. Besson can’t seem to make up his mind whether or not he’s writing the later version of Valerian who goes his own way and is a bit of a rogueish maverick or the earlier version who always meticulously followed orders no matter what. Laureline, meanwhile, having been stripped of her comics origin, is instead maddeningly inconsistent, going from ultra-competent and by-the-book to being stupid and hating people who follow the rules.

The running time of this movie is two and a quarter hours, and you feel every excruciating nanosecond of it. I felt like I’d been watching it for several weeks when I checked to see that I was only halfway through.