Valerian.and.the.city.of.a.thousand.planets.201... -
The film’s greatest triumph is its title character: the City of a Thousand Planets. Besson opens with a masterful, nearly dialogue-free montage showing the International Space Station expanding over centuries as alien races arrive, dock, and integrate. By the 28th century, Alpha has become a teeming, bioluminescent ecosystem of cultures. The production design is staggering, from the underwater market of Kyun to the shape-shifting shores of the planet Mul. Besson utilizes a hyper-saturated, colorful palette that stands in stark contrast to the gritty, grey realism of many contemporary blockbusters. Each new creature—from the dog-like assistant to the calculating rulers of the planet Pearls—is rendered with meticulous detail. In terms of pure visual inventiveness, the film is a masterpiece. It asks the audience to simply look and wonder, reviving the sense of awe that defined classic sci-fi illustration.
In 2017, French director Luc Besson released Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets , a film that represented a lifelong dream. Based on the seminal French comic series Valérian and Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières—a series that directly inspired Star Wars —Besson poured over $200 million of his own fortune into creating a visually unhinged, original sci-fi universe. The result is one of modern cinema’s most fascinating paradoxes: a film of breathtaking imaginative scope that is simultaneously hollow at its core. Valerian succeeds as a museum of futuristic art but fails as a compelling narrative, offering a crucial lesson about the difference between world-building and storytelling. Valerian.and.The.City.of.A.Thousand.Planets.201...
Valerian is not a bad movie to hate; it is a frustrating movie because it comes so close to greatness. Every frame is filled with the love Besson has for the source material. The world of Alpha feels lived-in, dangerous, and magical. But a city of a thousand planets is a setting, not a story. Without a hero to root for or a plot that surprises, the film remains a gorgeous, expensive corpse. It is a testament to the idea that in cinema, the heart must always be more important than the hologram. For all its thousands of planets, the film forgets to populate them with a single soul. The film’s greatest triumph is its title character:
