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.

However, the moment the film asks the audience to listen and care, it collapses. The central problem is the casting and characterization of the titular hero, Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan). Designed as a swaggering, cocky space cowboy in the vein of Han Solo, DeHaan instead delivers a performance that is unintentionally petulant and uncharismatic. His Valerian is less a daring agent and more a spoiled teenager who has read a book about seduction. The narrative repeatedly halts for him to aggressively proposition his partner, Laureline (Cara Delevingne), who, in a saner script, would have filed a sexual harassment complaint with the galactic federation. The chemistry between the leads is non-existent; Delevingne’s Laureline appears perpetually exhausted by her partner’s advances, which makes the film’s insistence that they are a romantic duo feel deeply uncomfortable rather than endearing. Valerian.and.The.City.of.A.Thousand.Planets.201...

This character failure is compounded by a plot that is distractingly derivative. The central conflict involves the genocide of a peaceful, ethereal race (the Pearls) by a greedy human commander, forcing Valerian to choose between military orders and morality. While earnest, this is a recycled trope from Avatar , Dances with Wolves , and countless other colonial guilt narratives. The film tries to juggle this heavy subject matter with goofy comedic interludes (Rihanna’s memorable but pointless shape-shifting burlesque routine) and bureaucratic satire. The tonal whiplash is severe. One moment, the film is meditating on ecological destruction; the next, it features a comedy relief character who can only say his own name like a sci-fi Pikachu. Besson, the director of the tightly-plotted The Fifth Element , seems to have forgotten how to balance tone. The film’s greatest triumph is its title character:

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. The production design is staggering, from the underwater