Directed by Luc Besson and based on the popular comic VALERIAN AND LAURELINE, VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS (2017) delivers stunning visuals and some decent action, but fails to deliver likeable characters and good dialogue, making it a lackluster watch. It’s a shame, as it offered a ton of promise (particularly in its spectacular trailer), and I was hoping for another FIFTH ELEMENT, which Besson also directed.

The film starts out with a great sequence showing the International Space Station becoming a hub for human and then alien civilizations, finally launching into deep space as Alpha, the city of a thousand planets, a monstrous spaceship that is really an entire world. Humans act as police for the entire galaxy, including Major Valerian and his partner Sergeant Laureline. Their first mission is to recover a unique animal that can replicate matter, which is wanted by both Alpha’s government and a species that was nearly driven to extinction. Valerian and Laureline must track these aliens into the heart of Alpha to save the day.

What I liked: the amazing visuals and world-building, through which we’re given a roller skate tour through the movie, which moves at a nice fast pace. The film is so beautiful and idiosyncratic one can almost forgive its flaws. What I didn’t like: almost everything else, from the wooden dialogue, poor casting, and terrible chemistry between the two leads (two otherwise capable actors); the convoluted and contradictory plot; the cliched moralizing; and the clumsy directing that sapped energy even from Rihanna’s spectacular dance sequence.

Overall, I’m glad I watched it because it’s visually spectacular, but as almost all the film’s energy comes from its setting, it comes across as pretty lifeless.

In THE SIGNAL, three MIT students–Nick, Jonah, and Haley–are on a road trip to move Haley to California. Nick has a degenerative condition that forces him to use crutches, and that plus Haley going to California for a year to attend Cal-tech is stressing their relationship. Jonah is obsessed with finding Nomad, a hacker who has been messing with them. They pinpoint Nomad’s location, and it turns out it’s on the way during their road trip. At this remote farmhouse, the three of them find something else, or rather it finds them. They wake up in a bizarre government facility that tells them they were abducted and must be studied. The weirdness escalates as they seek to escape and discover the truth of their abduction.

I enjoyed this movie quite a bit. Overall, it’s kind of like a big TWILIGHT ZONE episode, with an interesting mystery around what’s going on. For me, the main thing was the characters, who have great chemistry as we see them on their road trip in the setup. When the s hits the f, I cared about what happens to them and kept watching not because of the mystery but because of them. By paying heed to good film basics related to character, acting, dialogue, and pacing, this very simple low-budget indie sci-fi flick is elevated to a solid watch. Laurence Fishburne is great as the government scientist, a sort of antagonistic Morpheus. My only complaint is Haley goes from being interesting in the beginning to a blob for the rest of it, a weight for Nick to carry instead of growing as an engaging character.

Overall, again, THE SIGNAL is a solid watch.