Plot

Valerian – Outside of DeHaan, Valerian‘s biggest problem is being way over-plotted, which isn’t surprising for a 137-minute movie, which could have easily lost 20 minutes. There’s a core plot – a quasi-mystery about what happened to an extinct alien civilization – but it’s overwhelmed by so much filler. There’s a side quest in the beginning and a side quest in the middle. The side quest in the middle (the aforementioned segment with Rihanna and Ethan Hawke) lasts for so long that it’s easy to forget what the actual main story is. (It also doesn’t help that the main story is the least interesting of the three plots.) Maybe this movie would have worked better as a series of vignettes, where each of the three stories was its own unconnected chapter. Without such a long distraction in the middle, maybe the alien genocide would have been able to maintain an emotional core.

The Dark Tower – While Valerian suffered from overplotting, this movie suffers from severe underplotting. Your basic ‘must stop bad guy with vague world domination plans’ that leads to a rushed, horribly unsatisfying final confrontation. This needn’t be a bad thing if the movie was used for world building, but it wasn’t. There’s a small ramshackle town (not Tull, for book fans), a tech-y lair used by the Man in Black, and New York City where there’s nothing in Jake’s real life worth caring about. There’s little sense of the geography or history or horror that made Mid-World unique, nor is there any sense of mystery that should make us want to know more about this universe. Any of the overarching story that makes The Dark Tower books considered a legitimate epic is not there. When Walter is finally defeated in a clumsy, haphazard fashion, you don’t get a sense that there’s anything left to do in Mid-World. They should stay on Earth with the antibiotics.

The film also cheats with its world building by making regular use of Easter Eggs and references to some of Stephen King’s other works. (Jake’s psychic powers being called “The Shine” is the biggest one.) The Dark Tower book series might call upon bits and pieces of King’s entire oeuvre, and you can believe they are part of the same universe or multi-verse. But in our world of interconnected cinematic universes, it feels like the film is trying to hornswoggle us into thinking The Dark Tower is grander than it has any right to be. “The Shine” is clearly meant to make us think about The Shining, as though Jack Torrance and the Overloook are part of this world. But they aren’t, they can’t be because that property is owned by Warner Brothers and this is a Sony production. Capitalizing on our positive memories of actually good films does not make your film better, it’s rather insulting actually.

Winner – Valerian

Visuals

Valerian – This is obviously where the movie shines the most. Some of the CGI isn’t great, but for the most part the movie remains a visual wonderland throughout. Creatures and worlds look distinctive and colorful, and it would have been nice to dwell on some of them for longer than the film allowed. That, perhaps, is the highest compliment you can pay to Valerian. When all movies essentially have great effects, it’s rare to find a film that actually does something unique and memorable with them. But fantastic visuals and massive CGI don’t sell movies anymore, nor do they make up for a movie’s others shortcomings. We got over Avatar syndrome years ago.

The Dark Tower – Obviously this wasn’t going to top Valerian in scope, but that didn’t mean the movie had to be so bland. Building up atmosphere and some creatively done effects could have allowed Dark Tower to succeed in ambiance where Valerian succeeds in extravagance. Disappointingly, Dark Tower has no real visual flair. The franchise has roots in spaghetti Westerns, where scenic vistas and amazing cinematography turned relatively cheap films into Cinemascope classics respected nearly half a century later. Unfortunately, none of that inspiration is present here. Monsters, what few there are, are cheap and unimpressive. Portals are simply generic blue lightning portals, not the far more distinctive image of a lone standing door, as presented in the books. The film was relatively cheap with a reported production budget of only $60 million (which should indicate the lack of care Sony actually had for this property), but that didn’t mean what little they had to work with, had to give us so little in return.

Winner – Valerian

Conclusion

Too much love vs. studio coldness. Over plotting vs. under plotting. Visual glut vs. visual dearth. Characters no one cares about vs. … characters no one cares about. Although Valerian was more successful in comparison, it still failed overall. (It’s barely made $100 million worldwide, while The Dark Tower has yet to hit $60 million worldwide.) Unsurprisingly, the many problems – while not necessarily shared between these two films – are not altogether uncommon with most modern blockbusters.