Ghost Goes to the Movies—Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets · 11:00pm Jul 30th, 2017
This is the prettiest, stupidest movie I've ever seen.
There. That's your capsule review in case you are teetering on the edge of seeing it. I'm not sorry I saw it, but by the GODS is it stupid.
Okay, now for the actual review during which I will also ramble briefly on the subject of writing, fanfic, and skill.
HEREAFTER BE SPOILERS
I'll dispense with the good part of this movie first: It is _undeniably_ gorgeous. It's not the special effects, mind. Everything has good special effects these days. No, the visual imagination of it all, the color, the contrast, the framing, all of it, is _undeniably_ gorgeous, and the movie is at its best when the characters shut up and stuff _happens._ During those times I enjoyed myself thoroughly. The chase through two overlapping dimensions is exactly the sort of thing SF movies can do, but don't. The movie is also rich with visual flourishes that you can't really see anywhere outside of comic books: if you see it, keep an eye for a thing Besson does at least twice where someone crashes rapidly through a series of bizarre environments, which flick past almost too quick to see, giving a rather satisfying sense of visual richness.
The movie also, shamelessly, adores SF. It's as nerdy as movies come with no artifice, no arch ironic wink (Guardians of the Galaxy, I'm looking at you), no restraint, just a big, sloppy, slobbering kiss to Golden Age and New Wave SF. Some bits may look like they are remixes of stuff you've already seen (Mass Effect players, particularly, will be fighting deja vu a lot) but, in truth, the movie is actually aping the source of their inspiration, the ancient and long running (1967-2010) French comic it is an adaptation of, and of which invented a goodly part of the look of classic SF. For instance, the grungy slightly battered world populated by an indescribable menagerie of various aliens that's so obviously screams Star Wars? Valerian thought of it first. Yeah.
So, as a massive SF nerd (you are all shocked, I know) I have every reason to adore this movie.
However.
The writing of the movie is appalling. It's some of the worst I've ever seen. The start of the movie shows the Pearl species in their day to day, and the fact that they speak a conlang (what is it with Luc Besson and conlangs?) and that most of it is done without dialogue, it all comes across wonderfully, if insufferably twee and hippy-dippy in a Noble Savages in Harmony with Nature sort of way.
However, the moment Valerian and Laureline (the protagonists of the movie) show up the dialogue goes insufferably clunky. The initial discussion between the two is particularly cringe-worthy as they have a lengthy conversation where they basically read out their character sheets. "You are afraid of commitment," Laureline declares. I can only assume that the next line of "DID YOU GET THAT AUDIENCE? THERE WILL BE A TEST LATER!" was cut for time.
Naturally, while Valerian has some character traits, 'afraid of commitment' is something he doesn't demonstrate even once.
So what does he demonstrate? Well, just in that dialogue he demonstrates being an insufferable, vainglorious, self-centered oaf with the social graces of a Madagascar hissing cockroach.
So, you know, he has that going for him which is nice.
You see, the secondary plot of the movie is a romance between the two leads which boils down to Valerian deciding that, being the best, he clearly deserves Laureline. And she, on her part... deflects him? Sort of? Honestly, it reminds me of one of those slap-slap-kiss romances, except written by a alien from a species that reproduces using asexual budding who has had the concept described to him by a Martian (of the ch'ofii003 gender, not that that matters, you sexist) who's heard about it from a drunk human.
We are never explained how their relationship (?) came about, and they don't really interact much. I mean, they mostly shoot stuff and/or run after or away from things, fair enough, but they barely interact except to emit wooden, stilted cod-romantic dialogue and then go and shoot more. Oddly, Valerian does have genuine interaction with a character—a female (possibly?) shape-shifting poetry-quoting alien (played by Rhianna for... reasons?) forced to work in a any-desire-you-have brothel whose help he enlists to rescue Laureline[1] and with whom he has more lines of genuine human dialogue than with any other character in the movie.
Naturally, they kill her off immediately. Damn it.
[1] In a sub-plot that I'll get to, oh yes.
Outside from the terrible, wooden, soul-destroying romance subplot (I found myself wishing they brought in George Lucas to spice up the romantic dialogue), the main plot of the movie is not bad but... it's not good either.
The central conflict is driven by an evil military officer who is trying to destroy the refugees of the Pearls he sort-of genocided by way of collateral damage, by creating an entirely fake crisis about a radioactive zone in the heart of Alpha (giant multispecies space station) which is in fact where the refugees are hiding.
There's some filigree about how he needs a Converter (which is a tiny lizard thing that duplicates any item it eats—yes, really) for... some reason, and we never do learn what his actual plan was, but by the end of the movie it collapses to "kill everyone."
This isn't a terrible plot, plot-holes aside, but it is marred by two things: nobody's plans make any real sense (at one point the Pearls kidnap him because they thought he was carrying the Converter except why they thought this and why he wanted one in the first place is never explained) and random revelations are stuffed in at random times (80% through the movie Valerian busts out with the info that he's been holding the soul of a princess of the Pearl race in his mind for the entire movie without mentioning it, once. To make matters more interesting, this doesn't really... change anything. He just says it and comes up a few times and then her soul is extracted by a handwave (literally) and... um... that's it.
Further exposition is clunky and redundant (the characters who presumably live and work in Alpha[2] at one point ask for the computer to read a goddamn encyclopedia entry on the station which takes up a while) and the story often grows extra lumps and nodules that don't do anything.
See, nobody has an arc[3], so nothing really does much to further character, and certain plot developments are just impediments that are overcome without really doing much. The prime example is the kidnapping of Laureline arc. At one point the Pearls kidnap the Evil Commander (we never learn why) and Valerian gives chase only to lose control of his starfighter-thing and crash in a communications-blackout zone. Laureline goes after him and after a detour (in which she shoves her head into a jellyfish; I refuse to provide context for that) she find where he is, wakes him up, is incredibly angry he's not thankful, calms down, looks at pretty butterflies in a nearby gorge-thing, lets one alight on her finger and is immediately fished up by a weird alien creature who use some of the butterflies as lures.
[2] They are on first name basis with certain people on the station.
[3] At the end, Valerian trusts Laureline, which is nice and some hay is made of it, but the movie never shows him not trusting her before and doesn't show him changing his mind, either.
She is then taken hostage off screen despite the fact that she's, at the time, armed and in power armor. No explanation is given and in scenes before and after she kicks ass professionally.
Valerian has to go rescue her (which involves the aid of the shapeshifting alien named 'Bubble,' by the by) from being eaten by the emperor of the aliens with a squeeze of lemon. They fight the aliens, a lot, fall down a garbage chute, Bubble dies, and they dust themselves off and never speak of this again.
What that whole section (and it isn't short) was in aid of is utterly unclear. It doesn't really change the characters, and it doesn't advance the plot one iota.
After that they finally get to the radioactive zone (which isn't) meet the Pearl aliens, have an incredibly long conversation which consists entirely out of things we already know at this point, have a shouting match with the Evil Commander and knock him out. They then deliver the McGuff... Converter to the aliens (Valerian objects on the ground that they are soldiers and the Converter isn't theirs to give, especially against orders. Laureline counters by pointing out the POWER OF LUURRVVVVEEE, and that's that done.), and convince High Command to call off the attack without any problem.
Of course, the Evil Robots (there are evil robots, they don't do much most of the movie but they are there in the background being clearly evil) the Evil Commander left behind object and there's a shootout and then the starship the Pearls built (the Pearls built their own starship in the middle of the station in secret. Also this starship can, somehow, recreate their lost planet) breaks out of the station and the movie just sort of... stops. Oh, but the two leads hook up. So y'know. Yay.
Did I mention the writing is terrible?
Now, what shocks me about this movie is that its budget is something like $200 million. It demonstrates mastery of the visual arts that is a wonder to behold and a commendable visual creativity.
It also demonstrates writing chops that any competent FimFic writer can blow out of the water. You can pick a random well-reviewed fic and it'll have dialogue that's an order of magnitude better than this movie.
This leads me to a question I can't even imagine the answer to: With two hundred goddamn million goddamn dollars on the line, why couldn't they muster someone with the writing skills of a fanfic author (by definition someone writing for free!) to give the script a once-over and at least eliminate the sort of dialogue that makes your eyes bleed?
... Welp. That is NOT a direction my money and limited ability to tolerate a car and/or theater seats is going. Pity; I'd heard good things about the original material. Thanks for the heads up (as well as the oodles of awesome fic, if I haven't gushed in your direction before.)
So true. Hey Luc! Hire Ghost!
I happen to follow Howard Tayler for his movie critique and while he wasn't quite as blunt; he didn't hold his punches either:
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/valerian-and-the-city-of-a-thousand-planets/
Sorry you had to waste a cinema trip - but based on both you and Howard slating it, I'm going to save my money.
4618400 You beat me by a minute. I really liked his list of things he liked about it:
My theory: Hollywood is essentially a cargo cult. Producers look at good movies and instead of treating them as a visual storytelling experience, they treat them as a collection of miscellaneous superficial traits. Female Lead. Set in Space. Wacky Sidekick. Sequel to Something. Based on a Book. Reboot. Has CGI. Uses 4D Smell-o-vision. Whatever. A movie that succeeds must do so because its collection of traits contains at least one successful trait! So all you do is make your own movie with that same successful trait and you're golden!
And nobody has yet latched on to "good dialogue" as a successful trait, so it's not a priority for anybody who makes those decisions.
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I fully endorse that review. I enjoyed it more that Howard did, clearly, but only because my suspenders of disbelief are made of kevlar and gore-tex and I really tried. It's still terrible.
Besson's The Fifth Element has the same sort of slapdash writing and yet somehow it rattles its way across the finish line and into my shortlist of "movies I will watch over and over." Sounds like this one doesn't?
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Hahaha, I came in here thinking of that review as well. I also enjoyed his comment that he felt he owed Transformers: The Last Knight an apology now that he'd seen this film, and additionally his comparing it to the latest MST3K series chosen films Cry Wilderness (Insert obligatory "Wilderneeeeeess!" here) and Starcrusher (?).
Also, we learn from this that all of us have excellent tastes in webcomics.
4618399
Awww. Thank you.
4618409
I mean, I get that in part. A wild-eyed director stalks into your office and says "Hey, I want two hundred million dollars to film some handsome people cavorting in, around, and about some green-screens and then pay enough graphics artists to populate a small island nation to replace all the green with my fevered imaginings." and your job is to GIVE HIM THAT CASH.
Any sane mind would snap.
What I don't get is that... look, I'm a writer[1] and from my point of view the absolute cheapest thing to do is to get someone who won't try to chew on the keyboard to go over the script and replace the terrible dialogue that sounds like it was machine-translated from an alien tongue spoken entirely in smells with something that humans might say. I mean, what's the harm?
[1] Okay, of sorts[2].
[2] Aspiring writer?[3]
[3] Technically a writer?[4]
[4] I pretend to be a writer?[5]
[5] Just humor me, okay...
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I should have said this in the review: I adore The Fifth Element. This is... look, if you love The Fifth Element as I do, you will enjoy parts of the movie. But the dialogue and writing (which is absolutely worse here than in Fifth Element) will leave scars.
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Schlock Mercenary, Girl Genius, xkcd, Penny Arcade, Freefall, and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal myself. :)
Considering that Laureline was a peasant girl from 11th century France prior to her first encounter with Valérian, trying to establish the relationship between the two in the span of two hours without bringing up the the mess that is time-travel for an audience unfamiliar with the source material was bound to be troublesome. That said, not only are the movie's visuals a treat, they appear remarkably faithful to the original comics.
Your review is basically word-for-word my own takeaway. I don't exactly regret seeing it in the theater because that was the proper venue, and there were plenty of things that I did actually enjoy when it wasn't dragged down by the clunky dialogue, clunkier exposition, and a painfully executed "romantic(?)" sub-plot. That and introducing basically the best character in the movie (Bubble) two thirds of the way through and then kill her off three scenes later. Seriously, what was that about?
My recommendation: Get a skilled gag-dub group like Team Fourstar to re-write and perform their own script. All the same visuals, but with actual writers. Now THAT would be a quality experience.
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Humor engaged! We're certainly not here out of twisted enjoyment of footnote abuse.
that would be terrible.
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This is absolutely how it works in Hollywood. The classic "elevator pitch" is Successful Movie x Other Successful Movie. Make a hash of striking elements from each and get a well-known star or director attached to the project, and you'll get funding. Nobody[1] gives a wet fart about storytelling!
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[1] i.e. hardly anybody.
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They often do! Look at some of the writing credits in modern movies. There are four, five, sometimes even six writers[2] or more credited. And not every writer who works on a movie gets screen credit! "Script doctor" (i.e. a person who fixes an abominable screenplay) is a real job in that town. (Valerian had three, including the director.[3])
It's just that the industry is so incestuous and dismissive of it's audience's ability to tell good writing from bad, or even care, that it doesn't place much importance on it.
This is currently exacerbated by the Chinese market, that will (evidently) gobble down the worst crap imaginable and turn an American flop into a global success. That's why there are sequels to "utter box-office disasters" being made right now.
We get glorious special effects because even Hollywood producers can tell the difference between good visuals and bad at a glance. Not so with writing.
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[2] Spiderman: Homecoming, an actually good movie with clever writing.
[3] Unless there is a track record to indicate otherwise, seeing the director credited with the screenplay is a huge red flag. Who is going to tell them their script sucks?
Sounds, on the whole, like Avatar syndrome. On which note, at any point did you find yourself liking Evil Commander more than the major protagonists?
This reminds me of this time someone took 1) seeing The Dark Knight Rises, 2) knowing general Batman stuff, 3) having read Knightfall (on which TDKR was most closely based), and 4) about a half hour of typing to generate a synopsis excising most of the film's problems.
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An important few differences, from what I can tell secondhand (firsthand for Fifth Element), are: 1) the leads in The Fifth Element have traits; 2) these traits help the audience like them and thus 3) care about the peril they're in despite the fact that the details of that peril and how it relates to the world as a whole are... convoluted.
Well, good to know that there's nothing but allegedly edible cardboard in this particular bright and shiny cereal box.
I don't know why I went with that particular metaphor, but I'm pretty sure I'm now overqualified for screenwriting.
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Oh man, posting even half the comics I follow that are currently active would be a huge paragraph. But Schlock Mercenary is one of the absolute best. Girl Genius is neverending, not that I'm complaining at all.
A few others I follow, off the top of my head, DMFA, Sluggy Freelance, Tales of the Questor, Wilde Life, Atomic Robo, Stand Still Stay Silent, Order of the Stick, Star Powered, Furry Experience, Skin Deep, and The Whiteboard.
I read a lot.
Now I hesitate to see this in the theater. The visuals really grabbed me. But i'm a sucker for space and all things alien.
I love Sf (especially hard SF) and I loved the Valerian and Laureline anime. Which is my primary source of reference. It's a French-Japanese co-production. You can watch it on Crunchyroll.
I've read one comic. Was very good.
The romance sub-plot sounds bad. It was done rather well in the anime. They do love each other yet cant bring themselves to admit it to each other. Or themselves completely. And this causes them to fight and compete over everything. As it was mentioned above this is something that involved time travel and it took some time to develop.
The Fifth Element is a glorious piece of irreverent SF !
You nailed the review. Everyone should watch this movie, but they should watch it on Mute.
This lines up perfectly,if in a more detailed fashion, with what I've been hearing about this movie from critics I find mostly reliable. So, I guess I'll get it from the library when it's out on DVD just to see the special effects, but I'm not paying for it.
Unlike, say, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 or Spider-Man: Homecoming, which are recent examples of theatre-viewing movies.
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I've actually noticed this. When one movie comes out and is successful, we'll usually get a bunch of movies that have some of the same elements but executed poorly come out right afterwards.
That sounds like they randomly plucked elements from all over the comic series willy-nilly and haphazardly mashed them together, using nothing but spit and chewing gum to give the misshapen monstrosity a semblance of "cohesion". Based on past experience, I'm going to guess that Luc Besson was more interested in bringing the comic's wonderful visuals to screen than in telling any one of the stories it provided.
To be honest, that might actually be enough to make me watch it, now that I'm forewarned not to expect a good story or tolerable dialogue.
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Have talked to Hollywood producers.
Can confirm; Screenwriting is more about luck and keyword optimization than quality. But that shouldn't surprise you at all.
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yipp.nl/upload/cereal_mr.gif
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... You know, I can believe Minority Report was a subconscious influence there.
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But look at the particular bright and shiny (and animated) "Pine & Oats" cereal box! It's the metaphor perfectly captured as a visual effect!
This takes me back to April of 1977, when the "adult illustrated fantasy magazine" Heavy Metal first came out..
images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/619PtKDpH2L._SX369_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
"BENDER! Is this YOUR hydraulic fluid all over my priceless first edition?..."
It had tremendous pre-release buzz in the fandom. Everybody knew it was the American version of the French Metal Hurlant, so it was going to be hip and cool and European. It was going to combine the best of underground comics (i.e., sex) with high-concept graphic art. It was going to change the fandom, change the genre, CHANGE EVERYTHING...
...I was underwhelmed.
Oh, sure, the art was gorgeous, but...the stories went nowhere. Or if they did the characters were unrelatable, two-dimensional or both (and the stories petered out after awhile anyway). It was, as I observed at the time, just a bunch of fabulously talented but functionally illiterate artists playing with their crayolas.
This seems to bother the French a lot less than it bothered us Americans. But Heavy Metal rode high until the mid-1990's, when the Internet began to satisfy the average fan's appetite for all things louche. To my surprise it's still around: issue 286 came out recently.
My point being: Valerian sounds exactly like the sort of thing Heavy Metal (and, I guess, its French root-stock) were meant to promulgate--gorgeous eye-candy with enough word-globs to qualify as "narrative art." I can't help wondering whether that originally had something to do with French tax laws--making it "narrative" meant a lower tax rate or something. I don't know.
Ah, April 1977. Everybody was talking about Heavy Metal!
Then in May 1977, something came along that nobody had heard of or expected much of. A little movie by the name of Star Wars
It changed the fandom. Changed the genre. Changed everything.
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Most of society is, fundamentally, a cargo cult.
I mean, consider how many people don't understand the basic premise of a job. As far as many people are concerned, a job is something where you go do something for someone else and that person gives you money for it. In many cases they lack an intuitive understanding of how a job generates revenue for someone else. People talk about "good jobs" in the abstract, but they always focus on what is in it for them (more money) rather than "why would one job pay better than another?"
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I always assumed that the terrible writing in The Fifth Element was purposeful and that the movie existed somewhere between a pastiche and a parody.
I realize I may have been giving people too much credit.
I would argue that it's probably neither as pretty nor as stupid as Avatar, but ultimately the trailers looked pretty pretty and I guess technically Pocahontas was a decent movie to base a James Cameron film on.
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By god I miss Sluggy Freelance... but I went cold turkey on my list of webcomics like eight years ago and it'd take me almost that long to catch up at this point
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My advice? Give it another year or two. It's ending sometime next year, if the artist stays on target. Might as well let it end first.
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Shoot if I start now and read obsessively I *might* catch up by then...
Sounds like a terrible movie, would you say it's good enough (as in, bad enough without being absolutely garbage) for a movie night with friends to make fun of?
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I'd say so. Most of the terrible writing is immediately and laughably obvious; if you set out to rip on the movie from the start I imagine it would be quite giggle-worthy.
Have to say that this review is almost identical to my own opinion of the movie. I came in expecting great visuals and so-so writing based on reviews. But 5th Element wasn't exactly Hamlet and it's still entertaining and kind of classic. Not so this movie; I normally get sucked into the characters and plot pretty well, but half the time watching this I just wanted to bang my head on the seat in front of me over the plot and dialogue being so bad that you couldn't take anything seriously at all (and the movie definitely doesn't work as a raw comedy or surreal adventure you just go along with).
That subplot with the shapeshifter and the rescue pretty much sums it all up for me. Laureline is overpowered by some idiot fisherman with no explanation. Everyone acts like going into their territory is a problem and could cause a diplomatic incident. Valerian goes to find a shapeshifter, which is cool and I liked the character, but her introduction went on a bit long and then she's killed off abruptly and forgotten. Also they kill seemingly every alien, rendering the shapeshifter entirely unnecessary in the first place, and then everyone forgets about the whole diplomatic incident issue. Never mind that by the end of it all nothing has changed from when the whole kidnapping started.
Particularly bizarre is how often the characters announce character traits they or others have. When Valerian insists he's a soldier and has to do his duty at the end all I could think was, "what?" because it seemed completely out of nowhere, and then he's convinced to change his mind by the just as weird power of love = give them the macguffin speech.
The visuals on the movie are pretty great. Mostly in terms of neat special effects though. A lot of the world feels excessively "dark gray." It lacks the "brightness" of Guardians of the Galaxy, and it lacks the "white walls and plastic" of Star Wars. It certainly lacks the "comfortable light gray people would actually want to live in" of Star Trek. It feels like someone had a conversation about making Fifth Element look like New York of the future, and managed to get it right. Then someone described that process to someone else, and they attempted to make... I dunno, Detroit? Without as much success.
I want to say the world feels like a neat one that would be interesting to explore stories within. The origin of Alpha is interesting, and different from a lot of other SciFi settings. But so much else of the world feels less like an outgrowth of that concept, and more just... slapped together.
You praise the "Big Market" chase scene. Sure, that sort of interdimensional thing is something that feels like it fits in a SciFi setting. The special effects made it work. They spent a great deal of time and effort on the details to make it feel like an organic situation, with fantastical techno-magic. The characters intereacted with the tech in a way that made it feel like they were mostly used to this sort of stuff.
My issue is that Big Market itself is a terrible idea. Take Amazon/Ebay that we have today. What does Big Market accompish that they accomplish, only better due to better tech? Not much. You have to travel to a particular place, by spaceship. Then get on a hoverbus to get to some compound surrounded by a wall and protected by towers. You have to endure the desert environment, learn some basic interface stuff from a tour guide, all just to go shopping for knick-knacks. The tech supports this process.
In essence, you get to enjoy the convenience of not traveling to wherever Big Market is. Distance shopping. Only, you can't do so from the convenience of your own home. You have to travel to an access planet. There were more projected people in the market than were on Valarian's planet, so we know there is more than one access point. Maybe there is some sort of justification for this.
There were also non-projected "locals" in the marketplace. I may have missed it, but it seemed like all sellers were local. So everyone selling there has to compete for prime marketing real estate in what is apprently the biggest, most important, and therefore most expensive place to do business. A site like Ebay/Amazon allows sellers as well as buyers decentralize and removes that real estate competition. Sellers can enjoy "distance selling" as well.
You might argue that part of the process is the whole "tourism" aesthetic. Not only is it shopping, but it is being immersed in some "foreign" place. Well, why not just travel there for real? Or, use a holodeck. Since you're not actually there, why go through with the vr/projection tech demonstrated there? The Intruder had a holodeck on it. Why couldn't some Amazon/Ebay style market allow merchants to set up virtual holo-stores, and some immersive UI lets you browse digital storefronts, and interact from your home/holodeck? You could still use the matter-transportation boxes they showed with Big Market, or rely on more traditional "fly stuff in a cargo ship and wait for delivery" as needed.
Big Market looks like a huge step backwards in terms of a marketplace, and the tech invented to support it feels like something that wouldn't grow from the existing world. It was grown from someone's imagination to support this bad central idea, and make it good enough to hopefully feel in place.
As for the story: several events in the scene tried to make clever use of the setup in order to pull off the interception. The defenses in place of Big Market feel like stuff that would be fitting for Big Market if you get this far into accepting its existence. However, they also remove much of the value of Big Market from the story. You could have had exactly the same scene of stealth, infiltration, confrontation, and escape, and all the exact same complications to it. Just change it to the fact that Valarian and crew actually travel to Big Market's real location, and use some SciFi stealth/cloak device. Now you just have some physical location that people/aliens travel to in order to acquire goods only available there. You remove the objectionably weak "distance" shopping Big Market attempts to provide and gloriously fails at.
It is little things like that, the "Alex, read me the wikipedia article on Alpha please, I forget basic stuff about the place I live and work at." which conspire to make the world feel badly designed. You have elements that support other elements, and are "cohesive" but core ideas that are bad, and connecting elements that are bad too. In the old days, seeing evidence of the set (like strings holding model spaceships aloft) are joked at as being bad, but these days we see those strings in the writing and world design.
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For me, there a three things that really set The Fifth Element apart from this movie.
Firstly, Besson co-wrote The Fifth Element rather than writing it solo, so the dialogue, while still not exactly oscar-worthy, was significantly less ear-bleeding.
Secondly, while the visuals in Valerian were nice, they barely ever stayed with any one visual long enough for it to really register. So, after a while, I found they all just started to blur together. They were nice while I was looking at them, but I didn't remember many of them. By contrast, The Fifth Element would linger on places long enough for them to stick in your mind - we spent some time in the desert, then moved on, some time in the cab, then moved on, some time in the techno-apartment, then moved on. Made it much more memorable.
Thirdly, while I'm not sure it was pastiche or parody as 4619979 suggested (could be, but I'm not convinced), The Fifth Element was significantly less po-faced and take-me-serious-please than Valerian, so the silly plot and less-than-stellar dialogue feel more forgivable. In particular, the actors all embrace the archetypal roles they're given and just have fun with it (a horrendous understatement in Gary Oldman's case). In Valerian, they try to play everything so straight and it just falls flat.
So, yeah, as far as I'm concerned, there's no contest, The Fifth Element beats Valerian in nearly every important aspect.
Sorry about the long and late comment, just saw the movie and wanted to get that off my chest.
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"If someone from Hollywood promises to have lunch with you on Tuesday, there won't be any lunch and there may not be a Tuesday. Few words and no numbers have any meaning west of Nevada."
--P. J. O'Rourke