psocoptera

Yeah, so when they said "great visuals, bad writing", that was not anti-SFF snobbery talking.

Let me complain at length.

But first! Previews! I got the Wrinkle in Time preview and I can't believe the world has to not blow up until *March* for us to get to see it, augh. Looks so good. I am also tentatively interested in the romantic comedy where Reese Witherspoon plays a 40-year-old mom who trades in her husband for a small harem of twenty-year-olds... ok, I'm sure in practice it will be terrible, but I want to see what fandom can make of it? Like there's some interesting stuff there with interplay of Mom Identity and sexual identity, where she's momming two of them and fucking the third, and it's nice to see films with middle-aged ladies getting to Renew Their Lives With Youth(s), a traditionally dude-dominated genre.

Okay, now Valerian spoilers.

So the opening made me cry, starting with Apollo-Soyuz and then doing a montage of other nations coming to join Team Space and being welcomed and then it switches to aliens and aaaaah, Peace Through Space, I am the exact age for Mir to have been a big thing. (Could we plan a joint moon mission with North Korea or something? I bet we wouldn't want to blow each other up if we had a hot date for the moon...) And then we get some super-awesome alien planet visuals with pretty shimmery alien people, yay, and then bad stuff happens to them, oh no, and then the movie immediately squanders all this great set-up with weak-ass no-chemistry tiresome-gender-roles banter between the leads. I know I don't have the standing to be anti-heterosexuality, but, like, argh, another fine film ruined by heterosexuality before we even really got going. (To be fair, there are plenty of het ships I'm into. But not this one.)

Then we get a pretty nifty action sequence involving a semi-virtual market space with magic matter-translation boxes that can move physical objects (including people's hands) in and out of actually being in it, and there is some fun with that, although we also find out that our leads are totally cool with leaving the rest of their team to die, which knocked off a few more sympathetic-character points for me. There's a sort of interesting casting choice with the team all being largeish grizzled men and then our Top Agent leads are these soft-looking 20somethings, but then we get back to the base and it turns out Female Lead is the only woman in the entire military operation (or at least the only one with lines) - this movie had a major Women Are The Sex/Romance Class problem, sigh.

Most of the rest of the movie is Female Lead supporting Male Lead or serving as a foil for him - giving directions, giving bad directions, wearing embarrassing boob armor, getting emotional over him being in danger, becoming randomly helpless so he has a damsel-in-distress to rescue. This is all bad enough, but worse, the movie commits a pair of unpardonable mistakes, drastically underutilizing a shapeshifting character, and drastically underutilizing Rihanna who is playing said shapeshifter. Like, it was really ridiculous, they had her do a random but fun little burlesque act, and then she's around for the bit that nominally justifies needing a shapeshifter, and then literally the next scene she's suddenly randomly dying so she can pass on some life wisdom to Male Lead and unclutter the character count? What the fuck? I mean, yes, I get that what they really wanted here was the burlesque part, and I'm not saying I did not enjoy it, but here you have *a shapeshifter*, and you have a character we're instantly predisposed to like because they're Rihanna, maybe do a little more with that! Give us some fakeouts where we actually think she's a different character! Let her get to the finale and try to save the day by mimicking the bad guy, only she doesn't know the right code words! Let her receive the dead princess's soul from Male Lead and shapeshift into her so that she and her mom can have a better goodbye! Fifth Element did a better job 20 years ago with Ruby Rhod as the tertiary sidekick than this movie did with Rihanna and that's just sad.

(A side note: I really, really love Fifth Element; Fifth Element had an *outstanding* soundtrack (it's where I first heard Khaled, and then there's the amazingness with the opera/diva dance sequence), and the reconstruction scene, and I used to have an elaborate argument about what it was trying to do wrt quoting/parodying other SF classics that was probably bullshit but was fun to think about. Why was this not that good.)

And then the final ultimate emotional climax is that Male Lead doesn't want to give the nice shimmery people* their MacGuffin because Duty and Honor and Rule of Law but Female Lead makes a little speech about how Love conquers all of those things, so he does. Which, like, what the fuck does love have to do with anything, it was so clearly time for the Justice Is Bigger Than Following Orders speech, let this lady stand for righteousness! But she does not, but now everyone believes in love so the curtain can close on a kiss god knows etc. (I cringed so hard at the end I felt like one of my kids who are still in the "kissing is gross" stage.)

*I get that it is very natural when working in a visual medium to want to make the characters we like look nice and the characters we don't like not look so nice, but I am pretty tired of the trope where alien races' morality directly relates to how pretty they are, so the beautiful shimmery people are even better than humans, and the guys who want to eat people alive are ugly, etc.

So, yeah. Cannot recommend, alas. I always want the big SF films to be good but... too many of them are not. :(