VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF
A THOUSAND PLANETS
HHHHH
OUT 10 AUGUST / RATED M / 137 MINS
DIRECTOR Luc Besson
CAST Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne
LUC BESSON’S LATEST is something he’s
been itching to make for more than 20 years.
It’s based on comic strips that fired his
imagination as a petit garçon (the Star
Wars-influencing Valérian And Laureline, by
Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières).
It’s enabled him to let loose with digital
techniques he wished he’d had back on The
Fifth Element. And he’s made it on his own
terms, free of any studio interference, despite
the production’s whopping $180 million
budget. In short, Valerian And The City Of A
Thousand Planets is the most ambitious and
colossally risky cinematic endeavour since
James Cameron made Avatar.
The result is a breathless, boundless
candy-neon pinball-machine theme-park
freak-out so lacking in any sense of creative
restraint that it makes most other space
operas look shabby and timid. If you thought
Jupiter Ascending was visually conservative
and insufficiently bewildering, or that The
Force Awakens would have been improved by
a five-minute sequence in which Rihanna
pole-dances as a shapeshifting prostitute,
then Valerian is the movie for you. With
jellyfish that eat memories, aquatic monsters
the size of cathedrals and a bazaar so bizarre
its exists simultaneously in different
dimensions, it’s like Guardians Of The Galaxy
might have turned out if James Gunn were a
being made of pure mescaline.
But what’s missing is... well... everything
else. Story. Character. Coherence. A sense of
pace, even.
At two-and-a-quarter hours long,
Valerian is a marathon run at a sprint. It’s
exhausting. During those rare, nano-moments
where oh-so-pretty leads Dane DeHaan and
Cara Delevingne slow down to talk and flirt,
they communicate only in leaden cliché-ese.
Besson may be able to marshal the mighty
forces of VFX to artfully craft any weirdo
monster or spaceship his distended
subconscious can squirt out, but he can’t
create any chemistry between these two.
As for the plot, once you strip away all
the shiny cladding, it’s flimsier than a bottle
rocket attempting re-entry.
The sad truth is, once the giddy novelty
of riding dodgems in Besson’s psychedelic
space-carnival wanes, it all becomes
quite grating. DAN JOLIN
DIRECTOR Taylor Sheridan
CAST Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, Jon
Bernthal, Graham Greene, Gil BirminghamPLOT When wildlife officer Cory Lambert (Renner)
discovers the body of a local girl (Kelsey Asbille)
who has frozen to death within the snowy,
isolated Wind River Reservation, rookie FBI agent
Jane Banner (Olsen) is brought in to investigate,
enlisting hunter Cory to assist her navigate the
harsh terrain and hardened locals.OUT 10 AUGUST
RATED MA15+ / 107 MINS
HHHHHWIND RIVER
YES, COMIC-BOOK FANS, here we
have a movie where Jeremy ‘Hawkeye’ Renner
and Elizabeth ‘Scarlet Witch’ Olsen are
teamed-up, sans colourful costumes, side-by-side.
And while it’s no doubt fun to watch the
twosome display their special abilities in Marvel’s
Avengers films, there’s one special ability they
don’t get to flex all that often in the MCU —
their considerable acting chops.
That particular problem is ably rectified in
Wind River, the feature film directorial debut
from Sicario and Hell Or High Water
screenwriter Taylor Sheridan. Like those films,
this is a tense, taut crime thriller with well-drawn
characters, cracking dialogue and ample space to
develop and breathe — there’s not a levelled city
block in sight. In fact, what we get is the exact
opposite: the desolate, snow-covered plains of
rural Wyoming, its bitter, unforgiving conditions
making it an imposing antagonist in its own
right. Sheridan recognises this, mining his
location for both its natural beauty and harsness.The film opens with the elements already
honing in on its first victim: a young Native
American woman running barefoot through the
snow, desperate to escape something — or
someone. Her frozen body is discovered a few
days later by local hunter and tracker Cory
Lambert (Renner): a good man who’s good at his
job, but also a man carrying around the tragic
death of his daughter like a boulder on his back.
The discovery of the dead girl reopens old
wounds, and his interactions with the deceased’s
father (a fine, understated performance from
Birmingham) are imbued with a shared grief and
palpable heartbreak. It’s these quieter character
moments where Renner truly shines, reminding
viewers of his considerable talent.
The flip-side of the warm Cory is chilly
rookie FBI agent Jane Banner (Olsen), brought
in to investigate the death as a possible homicide.
She’s clearly low on people skills and is out of
her element — both in terms of locale and the
particulars of the case — and is in desperate
need of help from Cory to make any leeway with
the investigation. It’s your classic Mulder/Scully
odd couple team up, but their developing mutual
respect and ability to coax each other out of their
respective protective layers gives the film the glue
it needs to hold together the compelling but
reasonably uncomplicated central mystery.
Sheridan displays genuine talent behind the
camera, even if his screenplay doesn’t contain the
same degree of plot intricacies and surprises of
his other heralded works. He also steers the
climax of the film toward a gripping but grim
and violent showdown, the only misgiving being
that the amping up slightly undercuts the subtler
human moments that have preceded it.
JAMES JENNINGSVERDICT A finely crafted thriller with stellar
performances, Wind River will have viewers
riveted from beginning to bloody end.