The controversy, as explained in the first link, is that elements of the “Star Wars” movies were at least inspired by the comic “Valerian”. Certainly the Jabba the Hut character in the movie looks like a direct take. The article in the first link talks about how some of the design production people on Star Wars were French which led to the similarities, but it is hard to see how Han Solo’s encasement in carbonite, a key and now famous part of “The Empire Strikes Back”, was not directly copied by George Lucas from “Valerian”. The similarities in that are obvious and striking.
In any event, always happy with a new Luc Besson motion picture! I’ve not seen Lucy, but I thoroughly enjoyed both “The Professional” and “The Fifth Element”. My only reservation is Cara Delavigne. Being the current (admittedly wacky and fun) “It Girl” does not make you a good actress. I haven’t seen “Paper Towns”, but I wasn’t especially happy with her performance in “Suicide Squad” (although to be fair, there was a lot of wood in the movie generally).
I have a couple of issues of the comic, though they’re buried somewhere in boxes and I haven’t looked at them in a couple of decades. They’re remarkably prescient in style, considering how early they were drawn. They wouldn’t look out of place even now, forty five years later.
The cast of the movie look like 12yr olds, though Dane DeHaan is actually 31. That’s a bit disconcerting.
I remember some people saying that Felicity Jones looked too young to have been cast as the lead in Rogue One because Jyn was supposed to be in her late twenties. Jones was 31 when the movie was made.
Besson’s output is wildly uneven to say the least, but this does seem right down his best alley, so we’ll see. I’ve got the same issue as the OP with Cara Delavigne and I see the potential for an enormous flop - one thing that saved The Fifth Element was the casting. But hopefully it will at least be a distractingly entertaining flop if so ;).
Personally, I think that Besson is a terrible director in every way except casting, which he’s actually quite good at. And sometimes his casting is good enough that it can salvage the rest of film, or even make it great. Do these actors have the sense to know when to ignore what the director is telling them?
Nope. She’s not always awful ( I’d take her over Rebecca Pidgeon any day ), but she isn’t very nuanced. She was probably the weakest link in the The 5th Element IMHO ( I’ll hear NO criticism of Chris Tucker - Ruby Rhod was his finest moment! ). But thankfully her role lent itself to the unsubtle and she was okay. Even her slightly cringe-worthy attempts at serious emoting were tolerable in context. As casting goes, it was actually a happy fit. Which probably goes to backing up Chronos’ assertion.
Bruce Willis’s smirk really served him well in that movie, didn’t it? He was the perfect audience surrogate, making sure we know that *he *knows how ridiculous the whole thing was. Without him, the film would have been unwatchable.
Yeah, that struck me when I watched the trailer too. They seem too young to be these sooper-agent types that I think they’re supposed to be.
I decided to think of it this way: in this hyper-advanced society, there’s no reason for anyone to look old. Between advancements in gerontology, surgery, cybernetics - why not be young and cure-looking? That’s my fan-wank, anyway.
I’m cautious about it - it’s going to look beautiful, no doubt, but so did Jupiter Ascending, and that was a slog.
Actually, that’s very true. “I’ve got these weird ass clothes and this bleached blonde hairdo, but I’m getting paid a tonne of money for this and we all know it.”
GuanoLad
I actually thought it looked a bit 1970s “Buck Rogers”, especially the costumes. From what I’ve been able to glean from the Internet, its the sardonic plots that make it work.
I’m interested, and looking forward to the film*. I hadn’t heard of the Valerian series until recently, and I obtained one of the books to have a look. They haven’t been available in the US until recently, and they’re still pretty “hidden” (they’[re going to release a large volume containing several of the original books in the States, but not until just before the movie launches).
I have to admit that there’s a compelling case for a lot of imagery of Star Wars being lifted from the Valerian series, but they oversell the case – If you compare the pictures of the spacecraft with the Millenium Falcon closely, you’ll notice that they’re comparing the back of one ship to the front of the other. And the claims that Darth Vader (and his ruined face) come from Valerian is a helluva lot weaker, in my mind, than the case for Vader being lifted from the Fantastic Four’s Doctor Doom (All you have to add are shades and a samurai helmet). Other Star Wars elements are demonstrably taken from things like The Dam Busters , American comic books, and American written SF. But there’s a huge amount that appears to come, I must agree, from the French strip.
*I gotta admit, though, I find Besson’s stuff far from my favorite. I found Fifth Element and Lucy pretty dumb.
). But thankfully her role lent itself to the unsubtle and she was okay. Even her slightly cringe-worthy attempts at serious emoting were tolerable in context. As casting goes, it was actually a happy fit. Which probably goes to backing up Chronos’ assertion.