

Valerian. Recast both leads if you can, but in a pinch just DeHaan. Give Valerian himself a single iota of charisma and the movie ends up a slight but interesting lark instead of a slog.
There’s a line I’ve heard a couple times that if you swapped the pairs from Valerian and Passengers, both movies end up better, if maybe not quite “good.”



There’s also a very real problem of Lucas not really caring to get the best out of them, and for the younger actors it’s disastrous. Natalie Portman is generally a bit better at picking solid projects than elevating them (IMHO), but she’s every bit as bad as the Anakins in the prequels. Only the veterans who could draw on prior experience, and especially the British-trained theater actors, could work with the abstractions of the set and chew the scenery convincingly without a lot of helpful guidance.
On ANH, George was still a young Turk in naturalistic New Hollywood, and anyway he had exactly one mainstream success under his belt, so people could push back; there’s also the sometimes exaggerated but very real contributions of the editing team picking good takes and splicing them together in a way that feels right, certainly in the moment. On ESB he did his best work by going with scriptwriters and a veteran director who’d done a dozen films. Even on ROTJ, the non-guild director was a guy who’d done a lot of intimate character work on British TV, and if the plot was straining under its weight, you still got solid line readings and some convincing emotion.