User blog:PlanetStar/Movie Review

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a movie feasted with visual spectacles and has interesting story behind it, including where humanity might be heading several centuries in the future. Alpha space station was originally build from International Space Station still orbiting the Earth but got vastly bigger accompanying millions of people from thousands of species from planets in every direction from around Earth, hence the City of a Thousand Planets in its title.

The movie is starts with the beautiful beach on a faraway planet with beautiful but more primitive primates having grayish skin. Then what happen, something huge wiped out the planet and the movie is just getting started. Meet Valerian and Laureline devised by Luc Besson, who also made the spiritual prequel Fifth Element 20 years before this one. Of the two, Valerian is more visually spectacular than the other since the technology used to make this film is more advanced now. Other than the visuals, one of the most entertaining moment in this movie is Valerian got his device too heavy from all those magnetic metal balls sticking to it and falling for many levels. Apparently he brushed it off and continue on, while anybody else would've got seriously injured or even killed exactly from what Valerian did. Valerian and Laureline never get scared in this movie, despite enduring many fights they go through and are not afraid of aliens, let alone they're mostly friendly.

Let's go back to the visuals. It got a lot of colored lighting and glowing signs that when putten together would make it a spectacle and would be seen numerous times throughout the film. The marketplace called Big Market is the most visually spectacular market I've ever seen, in real life or in fiction. I wonder if cities will truly get more visually spectacular in the future, as well as a city in space. There are cities on Earth that are one of the most colorfully lighted and visually spectacular, such as Tokyo and Paris. It is not just the artificial lighting involves, already there's a butterfly that glows and Laureline find it so beautiful! I seen glowing butterfly in another film The Abyss, except that one is deep under the ocean. There is also one scene where there are glowing plants in the water similar to that on Pandora in Avatar.

To cap it off, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is the most visually spectacular film I've ever seen, but it may not be the most visually spectacular I'll ever seen during my whole life because as technologies used to make cines ever get more advanced, I expect to see more visually majestic films even surpassing this one.

This movie failed the budget to guarantee a sequel, but despite this, Luc Besson is thinking about making a direct sequel to this film but of a lower budget. Keep the hope raised for a sequel to see even more visual spectacles...