Valerian - Danny's Review

Given the young age of the protagonists, and the fact that it's a comic book adaptation, I expected this to be a child's film. And it was.

But it started well, with the International Space Station getting bigger and bigger into the future. All of a sudden it's 2130 and there's aliens. Then more aliens, tall thin blue ones looking happy on a beach. More than happy, overjoyed. You can tell they're happy because they constantly spin round with their arms aloft, grinning beatifically.

Unfortunately, things get worse, as we are introduced to super-agents Dane Dehaan and Cara Delevingne, flirting clumsily on a hologram beach. Their banter is poor, and continues throughout the film. "Everyone knows you're a ladykiller" purrs Cara. Each time things heat up, then one of them coyly mentions getting back to the mission.

The mission is pretty flimsy, and involves overturning obviously evil General Clive Owen. It's no spoiler to say he's evil, you'll work that out as soon as you see him, and his mysterious private guard of big black robots that he personally programmed.

However, the joy of a film like this is the individual scenes, a few of which work really well. My favourite is when Cara is captured and dressed up to present a big lemon to an alien king. But he licks his lips, squeezes the lemon on her, and prepares to eat her head. It's a good visual surprise. At the other end of the scale are numerous CGI journeys through space, which don't do much for me. And Rihanna's cameo was super-weak.

I might partly be grumpy because it was an 845pm showing and I was tired. Having said that, it was quite enjoyable. Big-budget fast-paced Sci Fi can't go too wrong.

Dunkirk - Danny's Review

First time I've been to the cinema since last October. This one was worth a trip; the sort of film that's better on the big screen. The most impressive big vistas were the beach, with loads and loads of soldiers on them.

It's a fairly short war epic, and it's not over the top with drama. There were only two staged moments, one where a pilot runs out of fuel (which you can spot a mile off as there are numerous warnings in advance about keeping an eye on the fuel level) and one where an eager boy on a civilian vessel gets accidentally hit by a shell-shocked Cilian Murphy. Apart from this silliness, it felt like a fairly honest slice of history, with the drama building up slowly throughout.

There's very little dialogue, and a fairly sparse pulsing soundtrack. The plot explanation is minimal (I struggled as I didn't know what a mole was), and like all war films it's hard to tell who's who.

It takes place on land, air and sea. On land the British soldiers stand around doing nothing, while the French heod the line. In the air the RAF pilots are suitably calm and chipper, "Afternoon!"" says one cheerfully after being rescued from near-death. At sea it's no fun at all, as every rescue leads you to another boat which is shortly sunk.

This being a historical film I was expecting lots of writing on the screen at the end about what happened, but instead I had to read all the Wikipedia pages. The main historical point seems to be that the Germans missed a trick in not finishing off the British when they had the chance. It's believed Hitler thought that once the British returned home they wouldn't come back to mainland Europe. The film could also do more to show that Dunkirk was in fact a stonking German victory (which is how it was described in Nazi Germany), as the British had to leave so much behind, for example 20,000 motorcycles.