Kevin's Watch

This, Luc Besson's sort of follow up to The Fifth Element, came to the screen, first with high hopes, then with crushingly critical reviews - and finally with (I believe) a pretty decent box office return worldwide and a more positive exit poll figure (79 percent on Google said they enjoyed it). Against this backdrop I had pretty mixed feelings as to what to expect from the film and alas I'm sorry to say that for me at least the reviewers got it right.
This is a film that, while it may work for the kids and adolescents, is so shallow and not even very good or original in the visual department, that it is unlikely to find any fans amongst the older viewers. The two young stars are attractive - but not engaging, and you struggle to build any enthusiasm for the end result of their adversarial type of foreplay. The one thousand planets are so off the shelf, so cartoonist in their color that the rubber-clad nature of their inhabitants seems entirely fitting and simply dull, dull, dull.

All in all about as much fun as a bowl of cold porridge and I could simply weep to see such fare served up by the man who gave us Leon.

I've been hesitant to watch it, and still haven't yet. It was a decision between showing the kids that or the Fifth Element, and I went with the Fifth Element. Still pretty entertaining, but the balletic action sequence during the Diva scene just isn't as cool as it used to be, due to so many emulators. It's sad because I was pretty excited about seeing Valium and the Buncha Planets as it was a passion project he has been trying to get made even before the Fifth Element. I'll still see it, and maybe with the kids. I'm hoping it will strike me in a different way than you, but yeah...Luc doesn't have the strongest of track records, despite putting out one of my all time favorite movies (Leon).
And as far as modern French directors that we getting notice in the 90's, I'd watch a million Jeunet films (including Alien Resurrection) before another bad Besson flick.

Perhaps I was too hard Cag. In fairness my younger family members were entirely OK with it and I was not feeling one hundred percent the day we saw it.

I first heard of this by reading a bad review, which turned me off from seeing it. Unusual for me, since I don't usually care about (or agree with) film reviews, and I don't remember what made me read it in the first place.

It really is a difficult one Sorus. I'm a seasoned enough cinema goer to recognise a good film - even if I don't like it. Valerian does not even do this much for me, so I can't but agree with the critical appraisal that this is quite simply just bad film making.