10 Things Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets Gets Hopelessly Wrong
1. Large Chunks Of The Plot Are Irrelevant
Valerian is about the mystical, noble savage-coded fish people and their quest for the super-science MacGuffins they need. What the movie actually shows for a good portion of its length has absolutely nothing to do with any of this.
Valerian pursues the fish people and gets lost in Alpha, so Loreline goes to find him. Then she gets captured and Valerian has to save her because she's a girl and she needs a wisecracking creep to come to the rescue. This all involves comedy aliens, Rihanna's shapeshifting sex worker, choreographed action sequences, a mad submarine captain and a dazzling flood of non-stop CGI.
What it doesn't involve is anything of any consequence to the main plot. The fish people and the bad guy are all just waiting around for Valerian to complete his random stumblings so they can get on with the third act.
Valerian and Loreline's misadventures could be happily razored out of the movie without any consequence. That would free up easily an hour for something more interesting to be happening