... requires enough mental and emotional strength and agility to lay a coherent story path through deliciously lively chaos among persons, place-times, and things. All of it is enhanced by quite a cleverly light, but definitely significant, verbal script, alluding to diverse details of the challenges inherent to personal and social human experiences.
One example that illustrates this point:
Alluding to competing interests, personally between potentially romantic Major Valerian and Sergeant Laureline, VS professionally between their role as agents of the government and their de facto advocacy for the Rights of Beings and for justice for the inhabitants of Mul irrespective of government -- a Shakespearean quote in the dialogue, relatively late in the movie action, AFTER all of the iconic elements (and that is iconic, because it IS a Shakespearean quote after-all) and after the consistently dialectic events between elements have been identified in imagery, action, and dialogue, the script uses a line from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra to tie everything together and to establish why this isn't just an especially colorful space jaunt with a more or less irrelevant personal romance story unnecessarily tacked onto it, so there's nothing accidental about the choice of this specific quote:
Antony, "There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned," ...
... making of Valerian's and Laureline's relationship an event related to what the TWO of them CHOOSE to do, that is, activism independent of their assigned roles and which is irrationally motivated for other beings, the Pearl who had inhabited the planet Mul, and which agent behaviors go against common reason, since Valerian and Laureline could have quite acceptably claimed plausible deniability for any responsibilities in regard to what happened to the Pearls and could have just as "successfully" gone off to engage in their next episode of beach-hopping, without more risk to themselves.
This story is like an alternative form of Shakespeare's play Antony and Cleopatra in which (instead of giving up and killing themselves and thus becoming nothing but more detritus in the tides of history in their space-time) Cleopatra had NOT feigned her reaction to their situation and Antony had NOT been so addicted to her as to have had no real choice in his relationship to her except suicide - AND - instead, the two of them had decided, even in the light of real risks of catastrophic failure, to do something authentically different, and therefore authentically revolutionary, to change the forces that they had participated in and to which they could ascribe many of their own doubts about their relationship to one another and, thus, also to others.
The rest of that quote from Shakespeare's play sheds additional light on the structure and action of this movie:
Cleopatra: "I'll set a bourn how far to be beloved." Antony: "Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth."
The old English derivation of the word "bourn" has to do with the intermittent flow of some small streams or other water-sources that provide the boundary of how far travelers or wanderers can go without losing access to the necessities of life. In response to the challenges that one faces in the presence of the possibilities of love, our screen writer adds the adult perspective on love that recognizes its fundamental risks and suggests that specific necessity creates opportunities for new persons and new space-times, instead of old repetitions of essentially and, therefore, inevitably suicidal mistakes and consequent lies, one sub-type of which, in the story of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, is what destroyed the Pearl beings and their planet, Mul, to begin with.
One example that illustrates this point:
Alluding to competing interests, personally between potentially romantic Major Valerian and Sergeant Laureline, VS professionally between their role as agents of the government and their de facto advocacy for the Rights of Beings and for justice for the inhabitants of Mul irrespective of government -- a Shakespearean quote in the dialogue, relatively late in the movie action, AFTER all of the iconic elements (and that is iconic, because it IS a Shakespearean quote after-all) and after the consistently dialectic events between elements have been identified in imagery, action, and dialogue, the script uses a line from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra to tie everything together and to establish why this isn't just an especially colorful space jaunt with a more or less irrelevant personal romance story unnecessarily tacked onto it, so there's nothing accidental about the choice of this specific quote:
Antony, "There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned," ...
... making of Valerian's and Laureline's relationship an event related to what the TWO of them CHOOSE to do, that is, activism independent of their assigned roles and which is irrationally motivated for other beings, the Pearl who had inhabited the planet Mul, and which agent behaviors go against common reason, since Valerian and Laureline could have quite acceptably claimed plausible deniability for any responsibilities in regard to what happened to the Pearls and could have just as "successfully" gone off to engage in their next episode of beach-hopping, without more risk to themselves.
This story is like an alternative form of Shakespeare's play Antony and Cleopatra in which (instead of giving up and killing themselves and thus becoming nothing but more detritus in the tides of history in their space-time) Cleopatra had NOT feigned her reaction to their situation and Antony had NOT been so addicted to her as to have had no real choice in his relationship to her except suicide - AND - instead, the two of them had decided, even in the light of real risks of catastrophic failure, to do something authentically different, and therefore authentically revolutionary, to change the forces that they had participated in and to which they could ascribe many of their own doubts about their relationship to one another and, thus, also to others.
The rest of that quote from Shakespeare's play sheds additional light on the structure and action of this movie:
Cleopatra: "I'll set a bourn how far to be beloved." Antony: "Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth."
The old English derivation of the word "bourn" has to do with the intermittent flow of some small streams or other water-sources that provide the boundary of how far travelers or wanderers can go without losing access to the necessities of life. In response to the challenges that one faces in the presence of the possibilities of love, our screen writer adds the adult perspective on love that recognizes its fundamental risks and suggests that specific necessity creates opportunities for new persons and new space-times, instead of old repetitions of essentially and, therefore, inevitably suicidal mistakes and consequent lies, one sub-type of which, in the story of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, is what destroyed the Pearl beings and their planet, Mul, to begin with.