Movie reviews is not exactly what this blog is about, but I thought that this movie, "Valerian," deserved a little rant for being so bad. Really. Very. Bad.
One thing that bothered me a lot is the racist taint that affects almost every scene of the movie. All the good guys are white, or even pearl-white, such as the sappy alien good guys/gals, whereas the bad guys are almost all dark skinned. Especially ugly and offensive are the brown-skinned "Boulan Bathors," shown as fat, ugly, stupid, and evil people, as well as displaying disgusting eating habits -- they look very much the way black Africans were described in movies up to the 1930s. And since they are so ugly, they can be killed without regret by the protagonists.
Maybe I am exaggerating, but something that bothered me even more is how nobody, nowhere, seems to have noticed this racist scenes of the movie, or at leas wrote on that. Which, I think, tells us something of the current cultural views. We seem to have returned to the time when Walt Disney made movies of funny black people with a bone stuck in the nose and nobody thought there was anything wrong with that.
At this point, I guess you won't be surprised if I tell you that the movie is stupid and uninteresting. It is. You see a lot of noisy explosions, spaceship chases, flashes of laser light, aliens running, and more, but the whole doesn't make much sense. The story rotates around a couple of totally uninteresting characters, Valerian and Laureline, who behave like spoiled children, quarreling with each other for no understandable reason while they keep running we don't know where, occasionally killing other characters or letting them die without showing any sign of regret. (must say that Cara Delevingne in the role of Laureline manages to do a decent job in giving a minimum of interest to her character).
Again, noting how bad a movie can be wouldn't seem to be so interesting to deserve a blog post, but nothing can be so bad that you can't at least learn something from it. In this case, you may learn something if you ask yourself something like "what the hell has happened that has destroyed the concept of 'narrative' from our culture?" Apart from the racism, apart from the nastiness, the real trouble with this movie is that it has no plot, no story, no narrative. It is as sophisticated in terms of plot as a running race: everybody runs, one wins. But, at least, in a race everyone runs in the same direction. In this movie, they seem to be running in all possible different directions and nobody knows where's the finish line.
Now, that's really bothersome: I can't think of any past civilization that made no attempt of telling at least some kind of a story in its cultural manifestations (except, maybe, the late Roman Empire if you happen to read Claudianus). From the time of Gilgamesh, the gist of telling a story was to give a challenge to the hero, see him fulfill is obligation, suffer and learn something in the process, and finally, get a reward. All that has disappeared from our culture. Don't ask me why, because I can't answer that.
I can only note that at the end of the Valerian movie, the hero asks the heroine if she wants to marry him and she answers "maybe." And that's a senseless close for a senseless movie.
