Of A Thousand Planets - E... Fix — Valerian And The City
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – Exploring the Universe of Luc Besson’s Visual Masterpiece
In the pantheon of 21st-century science fiction cinema, few films have dared to dream as big—or as colorfully—as Luc Besson’s 2017 adaptation of the beloved French comic series, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. While the film received mixed reviews upon release, focusing heavily on its casting choices and dialogue, a growing contingent of sci-fi enthusiasts has since reappraised the movie for what it truly is: a groundbreaking visual spectacle and a love letter to the source material that inspired classics like Star Wars.
For those searching for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – E (whether looking for an "explanation," "extended cut," or "epic review"), this article will serve as your definitive deep dive into the film’s ambitious world-building, its stunning set pieces, and why it remains a cult classic in waiting.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets — A Daring Ode to Worldbuilding, Wonder, and Risk
Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) walks a razor’s edge between cinematic excess and imaginative bravura. It’s a film that refuses modesty — a cartoon of cosmic ambition, drenched in saturated color, kinetic editing, and relentless invention. For anyone who loves science fiction as a genre of wonder rather than merely ideology, Valerian is an essential, if imperfect, modern fable: an argument that cinema can still astonish when it chooses imagination over convenience.
The Spectacular Imbalance: Style, Substance, and the Uncanny Valley in Valerian
Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) is a cinematic paradox: a film of breathtaking imagination and frustrating execution. Based on the French comic series Valérian and Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières—a work that directly inspired Star Wars—the film arrived with a legacy of influential source material and a $180 million budget. While it delivers an unparalleled sensory feast of world-building and visual effects, it ultimately stumbles over its lead characters and dialogue. This essay argues that Valerian is best understood as a landmark of production design and conceptual art, yet a cautionary tale about the irreplaceable need for emotional authenticity and charismatic casting in science fiction.
The film’s indisputable triumph is its visualization of Alpha, the “City of a Thousand Planets.” Besson and his design team translate Mézières’ retro-futuristic line art into a vibrant, sprawling metropolis where thousands of species coexist. The opening sequence, a montage set to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” masterfully shows the International Space Station expanding over centuries as alien races dock and integrate. This sequence, devoid of dialogue, represents the film at its purest: a hopeful, elegant depiction of peaceful cosmic evolution. Later set pieces, such as the multidimensional market on planet Kyrian—where characters must don special glasses to navigate shifting realities—demonstrate Besson’s peerless ability to stage action within a fully three-dimensional, constantly surprising environment. Every frame is dense with alien life, holographic advertisements, and architectural wonders, rewarding repeated viewings for detail-oriented fans of speculative design.
However, the narrative structure, while serviceable, is merely a skeleton to hang these visual marvels. The plot follows Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne), special operatives who uncover a hidden genocide against the peaceful Pearls of Mul, a humanoid species whose habitat was destroyed by human negligence. This eco-political message—a critique of militarism and colonial hubris—is timely and mature. Yet, the urgency of this plot is constantly undermined by the film’s tonal inconsistency. Besson treats the story with the earnest, swashbuckling pace of a 1980s adventure serial, complete with quippy one-liners and a jarring, unnecessary detour to a tropical beach resort for a shape-shifting subplot. The film never decides whether it wants to be a grave indictment of imperial violence or a light-hearted romp, leaving the audience emotionally adrift.
The central failure, however, lies in the casting and characterization of its heroes. Valerian is written as a cocky, womanizing rogue, but DeHaan’s performance lacks the roguish charm of a young Harrison Ford or Bruce Willis. Instead, his delivery comes across as petulant and uncharismatic, making his relentless pursuit of Laureline feel less like romantic tension and more like workplace harassment. Conversely, Delevingne’s Laureline is competent, sharp, and consistently right, but she is forced to play a reactive role, perpetually annoyed by a partner the script insists is heroic. The pair share no romantic chemistry; their bickering feels sibling-like rather than passionate. This disconnect is fatal, as the film’s emotional core—Valerian’s attempt to prove his love by earning her respect—rests entirely on an unconvincing dynamic. In a genre where audiences connect through characters, Valerian offers two beautiful, expensive mannequins.
Ultimately, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets stands as a fascinating artifact of 21st-century blockbuster filmmaking. It demonstrates how advanced visual effects can realize any conceivable world, yet proves that spectacle without soul is hollow. The film’s creative triumph is Alpha itself—a hopeful, diverse, living city that deserves to be explored in a more grounded story. Its failure is its human (and humanoid) drama. For fans of production design and alien ecology, the film is an essential reference. For those seeking a compelling sci-fi adventure, it serves as a shimmering, hollow reminder that even the most beautiful city feels empty when you don’t care about the people walking through it.
Title: The Magnificent Failure: Why Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Deserves a Second Look
Introduction: A Universe Built on Joy
In the summer of 2017, Luc Besson delivered Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, a film that arguably stands as the most expensive independent movie ever made. Funded by European equity and fueled by a lifetime of adoration for the French comic series Valérian and Laureline, Besson crafted a visual spectacle that was audacious in its scope and colorful in its execution. Yet, upon release, the film became a cautionary tale of blockbuster economics. It flopped at the American box office, Critics carped about the casting, and the narrative was dismissed as derivative.
However, time has a way of smoothing the edges of box office failures. Years later, removed from the hype cycle and the financial context, Valerian emerges not as a catastrophe, but as a fascinating artifact of pure, unadulterated imagination. It is a "magnificent failure"—a film that reaches for the stars, grasps them firmly in its visual design, but stumbles in the chemistry of its human elements.
The Visual Masterpiece: World-Building as Art
If Valerian succeeds at nothing else, it succeeds as a feat of world-building. In an era dominated by the desaturated palettes of the DC Extended Universe or the cookie-cutter aesthetics of greenscreen backlots, Besson turned Alpha (the city of the title) into a riot of color and creativity.
The opening montage alone—a wordless sequence set to David Bowie’s "Space Oddity," depicting the construction of a space station and the gradual handshake of humanity with alien species—is a masterclass in visual storytelling. It establishes a tone of utopian optimism that is refreshingly absent from modern dystopias.
The film’s pièce de résistance is the "Big Market" sequence. Here, Besson visualizes a concept that could only exist in cinema: a dimensional marketplace where tourists in a barren desert wear virtual reality headsets to shop in a bustling, futuristic bazaar existing in another dimension. The interplay between the tactile desert reality and the digital overlay creates a heist sequence that is innovative, confusing, and utterly exhilarating. It represents the peak of the film’s ambition: using CGI not just to blow things up, but to bend the rules of physics and perception.
The Mül Converters and the Weight of History
The film’s emotional core rests on the shoulders of the Mül, a pearlescent alien species whose destruction drives the plot. The prologue depicting their demise is visually stunning and unexpectedly heartbreaking, lending the film a moral weight that contrasts sharply with the breezy, quipping leads.
This backstory ties into the film’s deeper meta-narrative. Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières’ original comic, upon which the film is based, began in 1967. It is widely acknowledged that Star Wars borrowed heavily from the aesthetic of Valérian and Laureline. When Valerian the movie was released, critics called it a Star Wars rip-off, ignoring the irony that the progenitor was being accused of imitating the imitator. The film’s design—specifically the design of the Pearls and the spaceship—is a reclaiming of a sci-fi visual language that originated in French bande dessinée. Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets - E...
The Casting Conundrum: Where the Cracks Show
The elephant in the room, and the primary reason the film failed to connect with a broad audience, is the central pairing. Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne are talented performers, but they were miscast in roles that required the swashbuckling charm of a Han Solo or the wry competence of a Princess Leia.
DeHaan’s Valerian is pitched as a roguish lothario, but his performance feels overly youthful and intense, lacking the easy swagger the script demands. Delevingne’s Laureline is arguably the more compelling character—smarter, sharper, and more capable—but the chemistry between the two feels fraternal rather than romantic. Their bickering, meant to evoke classic screwball comedies, often comes across as petulant.
This disconnect creates a vacuum in the center of the film. The audience is asked to care deeply about their romance, yet the most magnetic presence in the movie is not the leads, but Rihanna, playing a shapeshifting entertainer named Bubble. Her performance, tragic and visually kinetic, highlights what the main duo lacked: genuine pathos.
A Legacy of Ambition
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a flawed gem. It is a film that prioritizes the quantity of its planets over the depth of its protagonists. The plot meanders, the dialogue clunks, and the tone shifts jarringly between childish farce (the alien duck creatures) and colonialist allegory.
Yet, it is precisely these idiosyncrasies that make it worth a deep write-up. In a cinematic landscape dominated by franchises owned by corporations and steered by focus groups, Valerian is a singular vision. It is the work of a director spending a fortune to paint his dream on the biggest canvas possible. It is messy, excessive, and beautiful.
To watch Valerian is to witness a filmmaker who loves the medium of science fiction with a childlike intensity. It is a reminder that cinema should be about showing us things we have never seen before. For all its narrative shortcomings, Valerian shows us a thousand things we have never seen, and for that, it deserves to be remembered not as a flop, but as a beautiful, expensive, and utterly unique mistake.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) is a visually ambitious space opera directed by Luc Besson, adapted from the long-running French comic series Valérian and Laureline. Set in the 28th century, it follows special operatives Major Valerian and Sergeant Laureline as they investigate a mysterious "dark force" at the heart of Alpha, a massive, ever-expanding space station inhabited by millions of beings from across the universe. Core Story & Characters Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
1. Introduction to the Universe
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a 2017 space opera film directed by Luc Besson, based on the French comic series Valérian and Laureline. It is renowned for its visual spectacle and holds the record for the most expensive European and independent film ever made.
Themes: Colonial Guilt and Ecological Collapse
Beneath the neon lights and laser fights, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets has a surprisingly heavy conscience. The Pearls of Mul are not warriors; they are peaceful, empathetic creatures destroyed by human greed. The human general’s excuse—"We thought they were enemies"—is a direct allegory for real-world military mistakes, from My Lai to drone strikes.
Furthermore, the converter creature represents natural resources. The human military wants to exploit it for unlimited energy; the Pearls need it to heal their dead planet. Besson is unsubtle: unchecked imperialism leads to mutual destruction. It is a rare blockbuster where the human government is the unambiguous bad guy, and the "aliens" are unequivocally the victims.
The Origin: From French Comics to Galactic Opera
Before diving into the plot, one must understand the DNA of the film. Valérian and Laureline (originally Valérian: Spatio-Temporal Agent) was created by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières in 1967. For fifty years, this comic series influenced nearly every major sci-fi property that followed. George Lucas has openly admitted that the design of Star Wars—from Princess Leia’s slave outfit to the crowded cantina on Tatooine—borrowed heavily from Mézières' art.
Luc Besson, a lifelong fan, spent nearly a decade trying to bring this universe to the screen. The result is a film that doesn't just adapt a single comic issue but uses the central concept of Alpha—a massive space station that grew over centuries into a "city of a thousand planets"—as a narrative sandbox.
Plot Summary: A Rescue Across Dimensions
The story follows Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne), agents of the United Human Federation. They are tasked with maintaining order throughout the universe. The film opens with a stunning, wordless montage showing the International Space Station gradually welcoming alien species, expanding over generations into the metropolis of Alpha.
The main plot kicks off when Valerian has a vision of a lost paradise planet, Mul, destroyed by a mysterious weapon. He discovers that a surviving race of peaceful humanoids, the Pearls, are hiding in the lower depths of Alpha, being hunted by a ruthless Commander (Clive Owen) who is covering up a past atrocity.
What follows is a chain of heists, chases, and dimension-hopping adventures, including a trip to the interdimensional market of "Big Market," a sequence that has already been hailed as one of the most inventive chase scenes in sci-fi history.