Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

Director: Luc Besson

Cast: Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Rihana

My expectations were extremely high for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) because the filmmaker behind the camera was the one and only Luc Besson, a director who has proven himself time and again to be a visionary with films like The Fifth Element (1995) and Lucy (2014). And he’s also proven himself in non genre films like Leon: The Professional (1994) and  The Big Blue (1988). Besson’s always been a prolific director who jumps effortlessly from genre to genre with success. But I was extremely excited with Valerian because it marked his return to big budget, larger than life, escapist science fiction that we saw him play with in The Fifth Element, a film I was blown away by when I first saw it. I literally saw it five times in theaters! And if the trailer for Valerian was to be an indication of what we could expect, Besson was poised to wow us again. Does Besson still have the ability to amaze us?

Valerian is all about these special government agents, Valerian and Laureline, who are assigned to retrieve a creature, the last of its kind, who can reproduce a pearl that can offer limited amounts of energy to the universe. But of course, dark, evil forces (read: the government) are after it and so, the race is on to protect this little creature from certain death. At the same time, Valerian is trying to prove his love to Laureline, will he ever learn to love anything but himself?

This film has lots of pros, but unfortunately lots of cons as well. But lets start with the good shall we? The good is that the film is a visual tour de force, a barrage of ideas that never stop coming. Right from the opening sequences of the movie, where we see how the titular city of a thousand planets is formed, we are wowed with race after race of alien beings, who start forming a part of the gigantic floating city in space. I get what Besson was going for with this movie. He wanted to do something that was so filled with imagination and creativity that there is no way it could be ignored. He wanted to give us an overdose of awesomeness and for all intents and purposes he succeeded. Imagination never stops with this one; you’ll be saying “cool” every five seconds. Now considering the amount of imagination and design involved in this movie, it should have been a huge hit in theaters. So what happened? Why did it flop so spectacularly?

The flopping came as a result of some of the films negative attributes. For starters the films plot is paper thin. There is no plot here save for running from one place to the next, trying to save a cute little creature. Sadly, without much more than that in terms of story, the film turns into a beautiful looking, empty spectacle. Pretty to look at, but with no substance, Valerian turns into the classic case of style over substance. Then there’s the fact that American audiences like a little familiarity with their genre fare and you’ve got yourselves the ingredients for a perfect bomb at the box office. If a film doesn’t come from some pre-existing universe that audiences were just dying to see come to life, then they won’t care or connect, even if the film is good. Valerian and Laureline comes from a French comic book from the sixties that American audiences never read or heard of until now. For Besson it’s a lifelong dream come true to bring his childhood comic book heroes to life, but for American audiences Valerian and Laureline is something they are not familiar with at all, filing it under the “too weird” file.

Then there’s this male chauvinist thing about it. Valerian treats women like sex objects, and for most of the film he treats Laureline like crap, even though he’s supposed to have affection for her. He’s always being the quintessential “guy” telling her to “wait here” while he takes care of everything, which today is considered “passé” by savvy movie audiences. In todays modern films, women have grown past the damsel in distress cliché, but apparently, nobody gave Besson the memo. Even the title of the film is chauvinist when you think about it. The comic was called Valerian and Laureline, not just Valerian. Why kick the female out of the film’s title? Is she not integral to the film? Are they not a duo? I roll my eyes at that type of thing. Then there’s the thing about the two protagonists having zero chemistry together. They do not look like they are attracted or in love with each other at all! It’s like we’re supposed to believe Valerian is passionately in love with Laureline, but there’s nothing there to prove it to us. It seems to me that if LOVE is the theme that is going to hold this film together, and it is supposed to be, well then Besson should have made sure it was passionate and heartfelt. He should have made sure their love for each other shined through and quite honestly, it doesn’t. Valerian comes through as a selfish cold guy who cares only for himself. I mean, I get it, he’s supposed to be selfish and cold in order to learn the ways of love, but come on. At least a glimpse of their love for each other would have been nice.

But I don’t think Besson ever meant for it to be “deep” or profound, it was simply meant to be a spectacle, eye candy in its purest form. So maybe if you go in with that mentality you won’t be disappointed. There’s a couple of inside jokes in there as well for lovers of The Fifth Element, actually, the film has many similarities with The Fifth Element, certain scenes in Valerian felt copy pasted from The Fifth Element, but fear not. Valerian has so many new ideas, you won’t mind. Final say is that this is an amazing film visually, conceptually and design wise, but is totally void of the love and emotions that it professes to be about, so that in my opinion is its biggest fault and in my opinion the reason why it tanked at the box office. And that’s weird because Besson’s theme, in a lot of his films has always been love, and human emotion, so in that sense I was surprised that the film was lacking in that area. Yet, in the films defense I will say that it didn’t deserve to fail as big as it did because there is space out there for escapist films whose sole purpose is to entertain us, and in that respect, Valerian did not fail at all.

Rating: 3 1/2 out of 5

A Cure for Wellness (2017)

A Cure for Wellness (2017)

Director: Gore Verbinski

Cast: Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth

A good place to start this review would be by mentioning that director Gore Verbinski was at one point attached to direct a film based on an extremely popular and successful video game called Bioshock.  Strangely enough I finished playing all three Bioschock games last week! I was so hooked, I had no social life for a while. I played all three games back to back! Upon finishing the Bioshock trilogy I was left with the notion that these games would in fact make fantastic movies and that if Gore Verbinski, a director I’ve come to admire, was going to be the one helming the film adaptation, I could rest assured It would be good adaptation. Sadly, just eight weeks before the film was to begin shooting, and after much pre-production, Universal got cold feet because Verbinski wanted the film to be a hard ‘R’ rated violent film and the studio didn’t want to risk 200 million on a big budget horror film. So Universal Studios pulled the plug on the project. Apparently Verbinski really had an itching to make that film because here comes a not surprisingly similar idea in the form of A Cure for Wellness (2017). So are the rumors true? Is this film heavily influenced by the game? And video game connections aside, was the film any good?

A Cure for Wellness tells the story of a young businessman named Lockhart, who is sent by his superiors to bring back his company’s CEO. You see, the rich old man went on a trip to the Swiss Alps to visit a ‘Wellness Spa’ and ended up never coming back. Lockhart’s mission is to bring him back at any cost because the future of the company is hanging on the balance of this one mission. The mysterious “spa” is rumored to have these curative waters, which can heal people, and quite possibly, give them immortality! Is it all on people’s minds? Or is there something else at work here? Will Lockhart ever return from the Spa that no one returns from?

So yes, the film does in fact have many, many things in common with Bioschock. It has leeches, it has lighthouses, it has crazy old people hell bent on “perfection” and beauty. It involves the idea of sucking the life out of people, so yeah, fans of Bioshock will find a special delight in seeing this film because it is in fact sort of like a Bioschock film, without the more expensive elements of the game, like having an entire city underwater. But even though it does have similarities to these games, it’s also very much its own thing. Video games similarities aside, the good news is that I truly enjoyed this creepy as hell movie. It’s the kind of old school horror film that does not in any way rely on jump scares, or cheap loud noises to creep you out.  Nope, these scares are well orchestrated my friends! The last time that Gore Verbinski took a stab at horror was with The Ring (2002) and I remember being blown away by that one the first time I saw it in theaters. It was a PG-13 horror film that showed me that when a filmmaker truly tries, the PG-13 rating doesn’t even matter! Of course, when a film is R rated you can go further and Verbinski really milks his ‘R’ rating in A Cure for Wellness. There are some truly gruesome bits here, but there’s also the intensity of the very adult thematic elements.

Verbinski gives the whole film this classy vibe, this felt like an old school horror film. How refreshing is it to see a horror film not aimed at teenagers? Where there isn’t a comic relief character saying stupid jokes after something frightening happens? I thank the horror gods that finally, here’s a horror movie through and through, trying its hardest to creep you out by slowly building on the terror and the paranoia, instead of treating us like idiots. So my hats down to Verbinski, this felt like a true horror film. It sinks you into the horror and then goes further, darker. The atmospheric elements on this film were handled splendidly. I notice how hard Verbinski was attempting to hold onto that dreadful atmosphere all the time. He made sure there were gloomy clouds, lonely hallways, creepy looking characters, a dreadful color palette. To me the best horror films are those that don’t let go of the atmosphere, as an audience, we like to stay in that spooky world and we want that spooky vibe all the time, and on this film we get it. From the spooky castle at the top of the hill, to the gloomy weather and the spooky ghost like young girl that looms around the spa, Gorvinski was trying to evoke doom, dread and isolation. He achieved it in my book. From a visual standpoint the film is fantastic. Verbinski succeeded in creating amazing visuals with this one. Like Kubrick, you could pause many moments on this film and they’d feel like a painting. There’s a lot of play with colors on this film, but not the kind that pop out, instead this film shows us muted colors that send the image of death and decay to our brains. And if its not grimmy dirty, its neat and almost too perfect. A clinical sort of perfection, which augments how some of the characters search for it.

And speaking about the films influences, well, they were all over the place. Starting with the most obvious one: Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973). A Cure for Wellness definitely follows that formula  in which the main character is falling into the spider’s web, little by little. He doesn’t realize what he is getting himself into until it is too late. It brought to mind other films like Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Martin Scorcese’s Shutter Island (2010) and even Roman Polansky’s Rosermary’s Baby (1968), the latter when it comes to the music on this film, which is perfect on certain scenes. So yeah, I loved it to death. It’s a film that explores the very nature of religion and why it exists. Why are people afraid to leave a cult? Why do we end up feeling like religion will save us? Why do we search for it? Do we need it? So here we have a film that plays with important themes, it’s not just another empty horror film. On the downside, the film does run for two hours and a half, I personally didn’t mind them because I find this theme fascinating, but I’m sure some audiences will grow impatient. My best advice would be to go into it expecting a slow burner that at the end will be worth the trip. At times I felt it was going too slow for its own good, but then bang, it reeled me in again. I saw it last night and ended up dreaming I was in that damned spa! Also, I feel like a second viewing is needed to truly absorb this one, it has a lot of story to it. Basically, I was a satisfied costumer with this movie.

Rating: 4 out of 5

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

Title: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

Director: Marc Webb

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, Dane DeHaan, Sally Field, Paul Giamatti

The Amazing Spiderman 2 was a great way to kick start the 2014 Summer Blockbuster Season; the season that many film buffs such as myself look forward to because it’s that time of the year when the biggest most bombastic films are unleashed. These films are meant to wow us, they are meant to be huge spectacles, and I have to say that The Amazing Spiderman 2 certainly falls into that category. Many moments during the film had me saying “amazing!”  out loud; so I think it’s safe to say the movie delivers where it’s supposed to deliver. What was so good about The Amazing Spiderman 2? And where did it fail?

This time around, Spiderman is having a great time being Spidey, saving the world, helping kids fight bullies, saving the world from rampaging villains, but he still has one dilemma, his promise to Gwen Stacy’s father before he died. If you remember correctly, fearing for his daughter’s life, Captain Stacy made Peter Parker promise him that he would leave Gwen Stacy out of his life.  So anyways, Spiderman tries to leave Gwen alone, but their attraction is too strong. At the same time, two villains are born: Electro and The Green Goblin, both of whom want Spidey dead, for their own respective reasons. Can Spider-Man be a hero and be in love at the same time?

I didn’t exactly love the first Amazing Spiderman movie. My big problem with it was the cgi; I didn’t really dig it. It made characters look too much like a cartoon, not real enough. This problem was especially evident whenever The Lizard appeared. I felt I was looking at some crappy cartoon. Not convincing in my book. The problem with a lot of these Spiderman movies has always been the CGI, which in my book has always been spotty. I was watching Spider-Man 3 (2007) the other day and boy, the CGI on that one was so obviously CGI, and when that happens, the film loses its grip on reality and falls apart in my book. And this is where this second film got things right, the CGI was excellent. When we follow Spidey as he swings through the city, well, he looks real enough in my book, you can see the ripples in his freaking suit, you hear the wind. An effort is made to make things convincing.

I was worried about the amount of villains, because not every director can handle a lot of villains properly, sometimes the end result is a Batman & Robin (1997) type of deal, where we have a bunch of villains and none of them are developed properly or treated with any dignity, the end result is a bunch of paper thin villains that aren’t brought to life in a satisfying way. The best example I can think of is Bane in Batman and Robin, and Venom in Spider-Man 3; both terrible renditions of important villains because both films where cluttered with way too many villains. Thankfully this doesn’t happen in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. For all intents and purposes this is Electro’s film and he looks and sounds kick ass. I loved the visual with all the blue fluorescent lightning bolts, it just looked freaking sweet. Mix that with the electric bass sound they put whenever Electro appears and we have a perfect marriage of sight and sound, the visuals and the sounds mixed like magic. The Green Goblins transformation was awesome…but I’m not entirely sure I love his overall look. In my book he still needs to be more monstrous, more demonic, like in the comics. Then we have The Rhino, but thankfully he is only used as a tease for the next film, which apparently will feature The Sinister Six, an amalgamation of some of Spidey’s deadliest villains.

The film did a fine balancing act between story, romance, kick ass action and mind blowing effects. In some ways it reminded me a bit of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002) because it had that thing where it went from romance, to action, then back to romance, then back to action again and so forth. Final words are that I can’t really bring myself to say anything bad about this movie. The only thing I can say didn’t really fit into the film was the tacked on “extra ending” with a scene that leads into X-men: Days of Future Past (2014), which will be premiering in the next couple of months. My problem with that scene was that it wasn’t even that good; it wasn’t a real grabber. And on top of that, it had absolutely nothing to do with The Amazing Spider-Man films. I would have preferred an extra ending that connected with The Amazing Spider-Man 3. But alas, it felt like a cheap way to promote X-Men: Days of Future Past. So yeah, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was a step up from the first film, I recommend it if you want to start the 2014 Summer Season with a blast!

Rating: 4 out of 5 

Chronicle (2012)

Title: Chronicle (2012)

Director: Josh Trank

Cast: DaneDehaan, Alex Russell, Michael B. Jordan  

Review:

Chronicle is one of the best telekinesis movie I have seen to date and trust me; I have seen a lot of them! Okay, maybe it aint better then David Cronenberg's Scanners (1981), but it definitely ranks way up there in my list of best telekinesis movies ever. If you want to know a bit more about films dealing with telekinesis, check out this article I wrote a while back called ‘A Mind is A Powerful Thing to Waste (Telekinesis Movies)’ where I list a bunch of telekinesis movies, amongst them the great Japanese animation classic Akira (1988). But seriously, they should’ve just called Chronicle Akira (1988)! Chronicle has so many similarities with Akira that I honestly felt like I was watching an Americanized version of it. True, Chronicle borrows quite a lot from Akira, but it does it so well and with such pizzazz that I’m not complaining. In fact, Chronicle gave me hope for the kind of things we might be seeing in the proposed  Akira film, which has been in development hell for quite some time. Directors for the proposed film adaptation of Akira have come and gone, writers have changed, actors have been attached and detached, but the film  never seems to actually take off. Last time I checked, it was Jaume Collet Serra, the director behind Orphan (2009) and House of Wax (2005). This is all understandable, after all, Akira is an epic and complex tale requiring a skilled filmmaker to do it, this film shouldn’t be handed to just anyone.

Chronicle plays like a simpler version of Akira, it takes place in our time, without the post-apocalyptic background, the political turmoil or the motorcycle gangs.. Story focuses on three teenagers who stumble upon an alien rock that suddenly gives them telekinetic powers. One day they are normal teenagers, the other they can move cars with the power of their minds. At first it’s all pranks, fun and games but things turn ugly when one of the three suddenly decides to use his powers to get back at anybody who ever messed with him. Suddenly, the worm has turned and there is going to be hell to pay! 

So yeah, first off this is a “found footage film” which means we see the film through the footage that somebody shot with a hand held camera. I recently reviewed Apollo 18 (2012); a found footage film about a lunar mission gone horribly wrong and in that review I talked a bit about how much I enjoy a well made found footage film. To me they bring me that much more closer to the action, they feel that much more in your face. Not to mention that when done right, realism levels can sky rocket, which is what happened with Chronicle, a film in which some situations and events are way more intense simply because of the documentary style. It also plays around with camera angles. Instead of always having the shaky cam jumping about, at some points the camera hovers around the characters because they make the camera float with the power of their minds, which I thought was a pretty nifty idea. It also gives viewers a breather from the “shaky cam” which  some viewers can get exhausted with.  

Some don’t seem to like this kind of film, or have grown tired of them (there’s so many of them  out there) but I say we better get used to them because this is simply another way to tell stories, another style and apparently it’s here to stay. One reason why found footage films are proliferating so much is because they are cheaper to make and at times like these, when the economy has affected even Hollywood, well, even Hollywood is cutting back in expenses. These films are usually shot on digital, with new actors that don’t cost producers a lot of money. A well made found footage film can cost anywhere from 11,000 dollars like Paranormal Activity (2007) to 5 million dollars like Apollo 18 (2012). Either way, these are cheaper films, certainly less then your regular Hollywood film. This is the reason why found footage films have proliferated so much these days. But anyways, I don’t really care why they are making them so much, I enjoy the “in your face” aspect of these films a whole lot. They got a bit more adrenaline infused into them. 

  

Thematically, the film plays with exactly the same themes that Akira addresses, mainly, the abuse of power. Once we have incredible amounts of power (as do the kids in this movie) should we succumb to abusing it? Should we allow ourselves to be corrupted by it? Or should we learn to harness it? Spiderman said that with great power comes great responsibility, which is true, but what happens when you give all that power to a nerd that was always picked on before? To a boy who suffers from physical abuse from his drunken father?  Will this new found power fuel his desires for revenge? This is to me where the film was most similar to Akira, because on Akira we have the same exact situation, Tetsuo is a young kid who gets picked on all the time, so when he gets his powers all he wants is to seek out the respect he was due. Other similarities involve the main character running around in hospital robes destroying everything in his path with his new found telekinetic powers; the visual alone should be enough to spark any anime fans memory. If you ask me, the director of this film, 26 year old Josh Trank should be given the chance to direct the Akira film! But alas, apparently he’s already been offered the opportunity to direct the upcoming Fantastic Four reboot for Marvel. Lucky dude! He’s already moving on up! And Chronicle was his first film! He’s got the makings of a promising director; I’m looking forward to whatever he’s making next.

What Chronicle does right is that it truly exploits the telekinesis angle to full extent. It really plays with the ideas of moving things with the power of your mind. While some films only do it in a half assed way, like for example PUSH (2009), which to me was a horrible film, Chronicle takes it all the way! It gets epic in scale and goes further than I expected it to go with its ideas. While watching it I felt like when I watched Superman II (1981) for the first time. When I first saw Superman II as a kid, that epic battle between Superman, Zod and his cronies was the epitome of ‘epicness’ for me. It was the ultimate superhero battle. Keep in mind this was way before the onslaught of superhero movies we have today, this was during the 80’s when superhero movies were rare. Watching Zod and Supes playing catch with buses and hurling billboards at each other was the ultimate rush for me! Watching Chronicle reminded me of that kind of feeling you get when you watch an epic battle between two ultra powerful beings wrecking the city, done absolutely right. The effects were quite good on this one!   

Another positive aspect of the film is that it takes its time in developing its characters. Before things get blown out of proportion, we slowly get to know these three fellows and how they come upon such fantastical powers. We get to see how they first learn to deal with their new found powers and how they learn to master them, to control them. Basically for a wile the film turns into an origin story; that first film you watch where they lay down all the rules of the game and show us how everything started. But after that introductory phase, the movie picks up and never let’s down, in fact, it gets completely out of control and jumps straight into “freaking awesome” territory. Highly recommend it! The last half of the movie is well worth the price of admission. It was a fast paced jolt of excitement, looking forward to seeing what Josh Trank will be directing next!

Rating: 4 1/2 out of 5