Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (Luc Besson, 2017)

Besson returns to outer space fantasy 20 years after The Fifth Element, adapting a popular French comic strip, and the results are less than edifying. The previous film was bonkers, of course, but in a largely creative way, not least in terms of production design. As is so often the case over time, when a director is called on to outdo his last FX blockbuster, more turns out to be significantly less. It's a total overbombardment of weirdness just for the sake of it, and the fact that the already throwaway plot of a couple of 28th-century space agents running around a space station full of thousands of odd and oddly uninteresting aliens hangs on us caring about the duo is a recipe for disaster. The casting of Dane DeHaan and model Cara Delevingne is spectacularly ill-advised: they look like children and the latter in particular cannot act at all, never mind the straight-from-French hammy dialogue they have to work with.

4/10