Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
This is a worthy spiritual sequel to The Fifth Element, just lacks a phenomenal main duo. These are merely good.
I also does not have the meme-tastic elements, like MULTIPASS, Mathieu Kassovitz (GIMME CAAAAASH) and Ruby Rhod, but that is impossible to replicate anyway. What is replicates is the sense of wonder, a new universe just outside the silver screen, filled with colourful characters and situations. It even has cute animals that turn out to be matter duplicators.
This sense of wonder also comes from the special effects. You get ILM and Weta working together to bring a colourful and strange world to life, while remaining in the realm of the fantastic and as unrealistic as possible.
As for the cast, Rihanna is the big revelation. She should have had more runtime to show her acting chops and not just her dance moves. Ethan Hawke is also over the top, but from him we can already expect greatness. The leads have a less interesting role, but Cara Delevigne goes above and beyond the call of duty.
The plot remains child-proof, even though it deals with attempted genocide. There are no moustache-twirling evil people here, just soldiers that went to far. Valerian himself is almost that person, until he is swayed by his better half.
I hope Michel Ancel is watching…
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.