Is Valerian a Victim of its Own Obscurity?

Over the weekend, the trailer for Luc Besson's (The Fifth Element, Lucy) rollicking science fiction adventure Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets hit the web.  If you haven't seen it yet, check it out.

My first thought: "Holy crap, that song must've been expensive."  The TV drama Mad Men has a great episode, "The Band of the 20th Century," in which several characters memorably gripe about how difficult and expensive it is to license a song by The Beatles, only to (spoilers) end the episode playing an excerpt from "Tomorrow Never Knows" for which the show paid over $250,000 (end spoilers).  In this trailer, Besson capitalizes on the ethereal otherness of the song "Because," and it works incredibly well.  A couple things are bothering me, though, and I'm not even sure its the filmmakers' fault.

Let me confess that I'm no fan of The Fifth Element.  There are pieces of film I love, but everything is just so outrageously aggressively French that I have a hard time connecting to much of the over-the-top weirdness (Chris Tucker is super committed as androgynous motor-mouth Ruby Rhod, but I want to gouge my eyes out every time he's on screen).  I also think Bruce Willis gives one of his sleepiest most disinterested performances, beginning what I like to call the Bruce-Willis-doesn't-care-about-making-action-movies-anymore phase of his career (the name is a work in-progress).  With that said, though, I'll admit it shows incredible amounts of creativity and zeal for adventure.  Outside of that film, I generally like Besson's work.  I'm even partial to his recent actioner, Lucy, despite its use of the egregiously dumb and disproven claim that humans only use 5% of their brain as the plot's driving conceit.  Besson doesn't let a silly thing like facts get in the way of crafting fun and compelling action sequences.

Back to the Valerian trailer, what gives me pause is the unshakable feeling that we've seen a lot of this before.  Every interesting bit reminds me of another movie.  The dark futurescapes, the alien designs, the action sequences; they all look ripped straight from movies like Blade Runner, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, Cloud Atlas, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Jupiter Ascending, or even The Fifth Element.  The problem here isn't that Valerian is plagiarizing or paying homage to those films, but rather the complete opposite.  For those that don't know, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is actually an adaptation of a tremendously influential and long-running French comic book, Valerian and Laureline.  Like Disney's sci-fantasy bomb John Carter and its Edgar Rice Burroughs penned source material, A Princess of Mars, Valerian feels derivative because its source comic has been superficially picked clean by science fiction writers and filmmakers over the 49 years since its original debut.  This presents a difficult, and perhaps impossible, challenge for the movie's filmmakers as they try to remain respectful of the original without making it feel like a shadow of its own rip-offs.

Another action film whose trailer landed this weekend, Ghost in the Shell (find it here), has a similar issue.  The original anime film and manga have inspired a wide range of directors from Spielberg to The Wachowskis.  Film has always had a fuzzy relationship with homage, and the line between innocent inspiration and blatant stealing gets hazier all the time.  I love many of the movies that have re-used or been inspired by these original works, and in many cases they use the ideas as touchstones to something truly original.  However, the fact that many of these original works are from outside the United States, and therefore less likely to be seen by Americans, makes the appropriation feel a little dirty.  Maybe with the expansion and globalization of the film market, this practice will soon become extinct.  Knowing artists, though, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets hits theaters on June 21, 2016.