It’s time to get back to talking about science fiction, so let me try to finish off that five-pack of movies that I started a while ago and then kept getting too busy to write about (I’ve watched all of them at this point).
This time it’s “Snowpiercer”. The main plot here is that an attempt to correct global warming accidentally causes a huge Ice Age — so bad that people can’t be outside, even bundled up, for more than minutes at a time — and all that’s left of humanity is seemingly in a train that keeps running around and around the world — or maybe just a continent — without ever stopping. This was the brainchild of an eccentric billionaire who really, really loved trains and it conveniently because humanity’s last hope. We start at the back of the train with the “poorest” people, who live in cramped quarters and are fed some kind of protein bars by armed guards, and every so often they come and take one of the kids away. This section has decided to take the train and take an opportunity to free the guy who designed the security for the train, bribing him with some kind of drug to help them get to the front of train, fighting their way through the sections as they do so.
The movie stars Chris Evans, who is the leader of the group and likely their best fighter, who claims to be doing this on the basis of principles but has a guilty secret that drives him on. So, basically, he’s a darker Captain America, and Evans does about as good a job with this character as he did with good ol’ Cap. It’s just a shame that the rest of the movie can’t really provide a strong basis for that kind of character.
As they proceed through the sections, the movie stops to show us the lives of the people in the sections, most of which are odd and discordant with our expectations, a fact that is most highlighted with the billionaire’s aide who is downright goofy at times. So we see a school where they talk about a rather biased view of history and some areas for the wealthy and so on and so forth, but they also have to stop every so often to have a battle with the billionaire’s army of guards to further the revolution plot. I really think it would have been better if they had simply picked one plot and ran with it. They could have made a good movie out of them only having automated systems for delivering food and deciding that they wanted to know what was going on, and so deciding to explore the train and coming across various different social groups and even seeming societies that are all separated from each other, getting to the front of the train only to discover that the billionaire is dead and everything is running on automatic, and they can’t even be certain that they need to stay on the train anymore. Or else they could have gone with the revolution and made everything seriously despotic without the extra goofiness, as the luxury compartments and the billionaire’s compartment worked pretty well to set that sort of thing up. Instead, the seriousness and fighting clashed with the goofiness of the aide and some of the compartments and meant that we had an inconsistent tone that, at least, dragged me out of the movie a bit.
It doesn’t help that the ending is pretty stupid. The security specialist and his daughter believe that things are warming up enough to survive outside the train, and so have a plan to blow one of the hatches open and give it a try. While Evans’ character is talking to the billionaire, they manage to do just that. This completely derails the train and kills pretty much everyone in the front section, and since it tosses some of the cars off into ravines from what we see there’s a pretty good chance that it’s killed everyone else, too. So we have the daughter and a young boy who was taken from the rear compartment at the beginning of the movie, and they go outside and survive, and then see a polar bear, and the movie ends there seemingly with an idea that there’s hope. Putting aside that if things were that cold the polar bears probably would have died off as well, as would most of their prey, this doesn’t seem like a very hopeful ending. After all, most if not all of the other humans are dead and so we might well only have a young teenage girl and a young boy left, facing a polar bear that is actually likely to see them as potential food and so might simply end up eating them and ending it all entirely. Even if it’s warm enough for them to not immediately freeze, they’re pretty likely to die in short order, so how is this a hopeful ending? If you’re going to go with that sort of ending at least have Evans’ character feel the need to stop the train and let everyone out and force them to fend for themselves in this brave old/new world so that there’s enough people left alive to restore civilization instead of leaving only two that we know of who won’t last long.
The discordant tone and dumb ending mean that this isn’t a movie that I’m likely to watch again, despite my liking Evans’ performance. I really wish it had known what it was trying for and made a more logical plot and ending than we got.
Thoughts on “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets”
June 28, 2022This is the last movie in the 5-pack of science fiction movies that I picked up and watched a while back and am now trying to finish writing about so that I can move on to other things. I’ll comment a bit on the pack itself at the end of this post.
The basic premise here is that after a nearby battle destroyed a planet an interstellar spy named Valerian and his companion/love interest Lauraline are sent to retrieve some stones that are key to a ritual that the natives of that planet have. They, of course, meet a lot of interference in that mission, but eventually do manage to get it back to their superiors … only to have it stolen again by the aliens, setting off a mission to retrieve them. Along the way, they discover that their superior was responsible for that disaster and should never have fired when he did, and so have to fight against his robotic soldiers to bring that alien race back to the galaxy.
The sad thing about this movie is that it could have made for an excellent light sci-fi spy romp. The action is pretty good and it definitely puts a priority on making the action fun and using the plot as an excuse to get into the action. The only downside to that is that the movie sometimes takes detours into exploring the world of the future when it really should be getting to the action parts. This isn’t a problem at the beginning of the movie, but towards the end after Lauraline is captured by brutal thug-like aliens the movie detours into sending Valerian to some kind of entertainment broker which involves a lot of talking and discussion and a musical number, all so that he can get his hands on some kind of disguise device — and an alien to use it — for his plan. For something so minor, it goes on for far too long when he had no idea what they were going to do with Lauraline and when the clock was ticking on the mission. But while that sequence hurts the ending there, that’s a relatively minor — but noticeable — offense for a space spy romp.
So what, then, really hurts the movie? The fact that neither of the main characters look like spies in the James Bond mold and yet the movie treats them as if they are supposed to be thought of that way. Valerian is not at all any kind of suave, debonair, exceptionally sexy spy, and Lauraline — played by model Cara Delevigne — isn’t that sort of sexy spy either. And that’s okay, because it’s been noted that what you want for a spy are people that are more nondescript and aren’t memorable and don’t stand out, and so if the movie was playing with that it would be interesting. However, Valerian is noted for having a lot of women on his record, which is the reason that Lauraline doesn’t want to marry him, and the movie constantly has people talk about how beautiful Lauraline is, which she uses to get her way at times. Except they aren’t attractive enough to pull that off, and so the movie treating them as if they are really takes me out of the movie. If they had either picked leads that better fit the sexy spy model or else had run with plainer spies subverting the expected tropes the movie would have worked so much better.
As it is, the movie is kinda fun, and so fits into the category of movies that I might want to watch again at some point but won’t rewatch any time soon. There’s just not enough in the movie to make it interesting to watch again, and it doesn’t quite work as a simple, light, space spy action movie.
So, out of the five movies, I think the best one is Dredd, for whatever that’s worth. Then probably comes Looper, Valerian, Snowpiercer and Hotel Artemis. For the most part, what I’d say is that unlike some of the other packs all of these movies have good production values, and yet all of them are sufficiently flawed to get me to not want to rewatch them any time soon. Thus, the whole pack goes into my box of movies to maybe rewatch at some point in the future.
I step outside of packs for my next sci-fi movie, which is “The Fifth Element”. Whenever I get around to writing about it, of course.
Tags:sci-fi
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