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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Every summer movie season needs at least one out-of-left-field entry that is so cheerfully bonkers it stands as a living rebuke to an industry that churns out noisy and soulless garbage like “ Transformers: The Last Knight .” This year, that film is “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” a deliriously entertaining film that finds writer/director Luc Besson swinging for the fences in his efforts to make a weirdo sci-fi epic for the ages and coming up with a virtual home run derby. It’s a film filled with humor, charm, excitement and so many memorable images that many viewers will find themselves struggling to keep from blinking so as not to miss any of the eye-popping delights crammed into each overstuffed frame.

The film is inspired by Valerian and Laureline , a French comic book series created by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mezieres that is said, especially among European comic book buffs, to have influenced the look of any number of films over the years, including “ Star Wars .” The comics also helped to instill an interest in the genre in a ten-year-old Besson, who would eventually go on to employ Mezieres to help design the look of his own elaborate sci-fi epic, “ The Fifth Element .” Besson may be one of the leading players on the international moviemaking scene, but while watching “Valerian,” he has reverted, in the best possible way, to the mindset of a kid helplessly enthralled by the wild plotting, bizarre alien worlds and breathless derring-do on display—albeit a kid who has been able to marshal together armies of cutting-edge visual technicians and a near-$200 million budget (the largest in French film history) to bring it all to life exactly as it played in his head.

Set in the 28th century, the film centers on Valerian ( Dane DeHaan ) and Laureline ( Cara Delevingne ), a pair of special operatives fighting crime throughout the universe. As the story begins, the two are sent off to Big Market, a virtual-reality bazaar whose hordes of vendors can only be seen and approached after donning special equipment, to confiscate an ultra-rare and powerful Mül Converter, an adorable creature capable of reproducing anything that it eats. The cocky Valerian soon finds himself being pursued by any number of creatures while the far more cool and collected Laureline is charged with saving his bacon, presumably not for the first time.

The twist this time is that, due to a technological malfunction, Valerian is also trapped between two different levels of reality with most of his body in the real world while his arm is stuck in the virtual universe. This may not make a lot of sense in the explanation but the end result on the screen is a hilarious and exciting thing of crackpot beauty that is just one high point of a film filled with them.

After securing the Mül Converter, Valerian and Laureline report to Alpha, a massive floating city that began centuries earlier as the International Space Station and has expanded over the years to serve as a home away from home for aliens from throughout the universe to live together in harmony. Now Alpha’s very existence is being threatened from within, and Valerian and Laureline are charged with getting to the bottom of things before it is too late. The two uncover evidence of a massive government conspiracy to cover up a ghastly mistake. As they try to unravel the scheme before all is lost, the two are separated and have a series of adventures involving a wild collection of creatures, the most memorable of which is a shape-shifting “glampod” played by pop princess Rihanna, who turns up to help Valerian rescue Laureline.

Besson has long been one of the most stylish filmmakers, but he outdoes himself here. There is not a scene in the film that does not contain a visual worth savoring, whether it is an unusual creature, an extravagant costume or just a throwaway oddity lurking in a corner. (This is one of the rare recent films in which the 3-D option is clearly the way to go.) At the same time, though, Besson is using his visual skills as a way of telling the story instead of merely serving up bits of gourmet eye candy. Take the extended early sequence set on a bucolic distant planet whose sleek and iridescent inhabitants go about their business before being interrupted by a cataclysmic event. The scene is an initial grabber because of the absolutely gorgeous design of the planet and its inhabitants. But as it goes on, we quickly get a sense of who they are in relation to each other and how their world functions without a single word of dialogue to explain any of it.

Some will complain that the screenplay is little more than a series of action sequences linked together by a story that doesn’t make any sense and absurdly clunky dialogue. While some of the criticisms are valid—there are times when the dialogue sounds as if it underwent one pass too many through translation software programmed by George Lucas —Besson’s narrative is more ambitious than usual this time around and, for all the silliness on display, ultimately touches on real-world concerns such as political corruption and the international refugee crisis in ways that lend real emotional weight to the proceedings. At the same time, “Valerian” is unusually optimistic in its depiction of the future from the charming prologue showing the evolution of Alpha to the sight of its inhabitants living together in peace. At a time when virtually every futuristic film envisions some form of dystopian nightmare, the sunnier take shown here is refreshing.

The only weak element to “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” ironically enough, is Valerian himself. Throughout his career, Besson has never shown much interest in telling stories based around conventionally masculine heroes. Most of his films have centered on tough and resourceful female characters, and when guys have been front-and-center, Besson has subverted their macho natures in some way (such as dressing Bruce Willis in Jean-Paul Gaultier in “The Fifth Element”). Here, Valerian should be brave, bold and resourceful, but as inhabited by DeHaan, he comes across more like a callow kid struggling to emulate the effortless cool of Han Solo. Besson is clearly more interested in the character of Laureline, and viewers will be, too, thanks to Delevingne’s performance. She is funny, convincing in the fight scenes, charismatic as hell, and capable of taking an absurdly melodramatic speech like her climactic oratory on the importance of love and making it work. Thanks to films like “ Wonder Woman ” and the recent “Star Wars” entries, we are in a new age of exemplary female heroes at the multiplex, and Laureline is fully deserving of a place among them.

“Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” is an utter delight and one of the most gorgeous fantasies to hit the screen in recent memory—the kind of film that can take moviegoers logy from the usual array of craptaculars and render them giddy with its pure fun. The question, of course, is whether viewers will be willing to give its weirdo charms a chance. But if you want to come away from a film feeling dazzled instead of simply dazed, this is an absolute must. Besides, it is almost certainly going to become a cult favorite in a few years, so why not get in on the ground floor while you can?

Peter Sobczynski

A moderately insightful critic, full-on Swiftie and all-around bon vivant , Peter Sobczynski, in addition to his work at this site, is also a contributor to The Spool and can be heard weekly discussing new Blu-Ray releases on the Movie Madness podcast on the Now Playing network.

Aymeline Valade as Haban-Limaï
Clive Owen as Commander Arün Filitt
Dane DeHaan as Valerian
Kris Wu as Sergeant Neza
Elizabeth Debicki as Haban Limaï (voice)
Rihanna as Bubble
John Goodman as Igon Siruss (voice)
Cara Delevingne as Laureline
Julien Bleitrach as Martapurai #2
Ethan Hawke as Jolly the Pimp
Alexandre Desplat

Writer (comic book)

Jean-Claude Méziéres
Pierre Christin

Cinematographer

Thierry Arbogast

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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Reviews

...a nearly 140 minutes slog through poor storytelling, boring characters, laughably bad dialogue, and CGI overload.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Aug 21, 2022

If you’d asked me ... if it would matter that I’d spend a good three-quarters of a movie having no idea what was going on, I would have said: Yes. Yes, that would matter. But that was before I’d seen Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.

Full Review | Jun 21, 2022

The outcome here is uneven: admirable for its ambition and mindless entertainment value, unable to hold up under close scrutiny, and often dazzlingly beautiful.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 23, 2022

It's a celebration of color and adventure and that's gotta be worth something.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 29, 2021

City of a Thousand Planets leaves much to be desired. Yes, it has all the eye-popping visual candy of a typical summer blockbuster but it lacks an original story line.

Full Review | Aug 25, 2021

The visuals are amazing, but the witless banter recalls Katherine Heigl and Gerald Butler far more than it stirs memories of Stanley Kubrick and Ridley Scott.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 16, 2021

Cara Delevingne and Rihanna cannot save Luc Besson's vacuous blockbuster.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 23, 2021

There are a few amusing sci-fi concoctions running around, but they're savagely humbled by the dreadful conversations and lackluster love banter.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Dec 5, 2020

DeHaan and Delevingne have zero chemistry.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4.0 | Sep 26, 2020

Though Luc Besson's usual failings have been amplified by his ambition, that ambition is worth seeing for the extremity of the spectacle alone.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 25, 2020

It deserves a hand for its go for broke, no holds barred attitude. But sometimes, effort alone is not enough to stand out.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Jul 18, 2020

I think I can sum this film up by saying; The Visuals = Good Bonkers, The Plot = Bad Bonkers. Believe me, it's all bonkers. It is garishly multi-coloured bobbins on an insanely huge scale. It is mostly entertaining and the visual feast is worth it.

Full Review | Original Score: 6.5/10 | Jul 2, 2020

There's no excuse for a movie this insane to be so terminally dull.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Jul 1, 2020

Besson is not the best of storytellers, but ... the style is all-encompassing enough to turn back around and render the story and characters coherent.

Full Review | Jul 1, 2020

I really loved this world.

Full Review | May 12, 2020

It was different.

If you're worn down by grim visions of the future, Valerian is the antidote. It's rambunctious and outrageous, but above all else, it keeps things fun.

The human heroes may receive top billing, but it's the world of Valerian that steals the show.

Full Review | Mar 30, 2020

DeHaan and Delevingne tried their best in their performances. That paid off in places, but the rest of the film just did not hold water.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Oct 10, 2019

The fact that it winds up as empty and cynical as any made-by-a-committee movie is what murders it.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Sep 27, 2019

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Film Review: ‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets’

'Lucy' director Luc Besson returns to the realm of sci-fi, serving up an expansive, expensive adventure whose creativity outweighs its more uneven elements.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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A long time ago in our very own galaxy, Luc Besson dreamed of directing a movie version of “Valérian and Laureline,” a sexy French comic book series featuring a pair of futuristic crime fighters who travel through space and time to uphold the law. Although scholars consider the pulp source material to have been an influence on George Lucas’ original “Star Wars” movie, the equation clearly works the other way around in Besson’s hands, as “ Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets ” finds the director doing his best “Star Wars” impression.

It’s a bold goal in a marketplace that hasn’t traditionally been very welcoming to “Star Wars” imitators, but Besson is one of the few living directors with both the ambition and the ability to establish his own rival universe. At a time when “Star Wars” itself has gone corporate (granted, the tight control has yielded some of the series’ best entries), “Valerian” manages to be both cutting-edge and delightfully old-school — the kind of wild, endlessly creative thrill ride that only the director of “Lucy” and “The Fifth Element” could deliver, constructed as an episodic series of missions, scrapes and near-misses featuring a mind-blowing array of environments and stunning computer-generated alien characters.

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Too bad Valerian himself is such a dud. Written as a kind of cocky intergalactic lothario, Valerian ought to be as sexy and charismatic as a young Han Solo, though “Chronicle” star Dane DeHaan — so good in brooding-emo mode — seems incapable of playing the kind of aloof insouciance that made Harrison Ford so irresistible. Despite holding the rank of major, Valerian looks like an overgrown kid, overcompensating via an unconvincingly gruff faux Keanu Reeves accent (with the questionable dye job to match).

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Fortunately, his co-star is cool enough for the both of them: As played by British fashion model Cara Delevingne (downright wooden in last summer’s “Suicide Squad,” but a revelation here: sassy, sarcastic and spontaneous), Laureline holds true to one of Besson’s core beliefs — that nothing’s sexier than an assertive, empowered leading lady. Sure, she needs rescuing at times, but more often than not, she’s the one getting Valerian out of trouble. She’s just a sergeant, but every bit as capable as her commanding officer, and the film is considerably more fun when following her character.

The chemistry between the two may be odd, but they make a good team, constantly trying to prove themselves to one another while each pretending not to care. In their first scene together, Valerian asks Laureline to marry him — a strangely old-fashioned demand, given the 28th-century setting, that plays like a 1950s ploy to seduce the virginal preacher’s daughter. And yet, in so many ways, she seems worldlier than he does, right down to the film’s climactic monologue, in which Laureline lectures Valerian on the meaning of love.

Most of the time, he’s too busy following orders to question what his superiors are asking, but such blind obedience has its bounds, since the plot of “Valerian” concerns a vast military coverup for a cataclysm Besson depicts in the film’s opening minutes: the near-annihilation of a seemingly primitive, yet peaceful species known as Pearls. Tall, slender and scantily dressed, like “Avatar’s” Na’vi, with bald heads and iridescent opaline skin, the Pearl are the most elegant and expressive of the movie’s many computer-generated aliens. Their long limbs give them a graceful, supermodel gait, while their faces are nuanced enough to convey even subtle emotions — testament to just how sophisticated performance capture technology has become, even in someone other than Andy Serkis’ hands.

Such innovations make it possible for Besson to build upon the multiculturalism of the “Star Wars” series in a big way, taking the intermingling of species in the classic cantina scene and expanding it to a vast city named Alpha, where a seemingly infinite number of aliens happily stick to their roles (like a pre-equal-opportunity Zootopia), while humans of all colors run the show (including Herbie Hancock as the city’s Minister of Defense). No doubt, there are dark and sordid “Blade Runner”-esque corners to this hyper-modern megalopolis, but Besson never lingers long enough for us to play more than fly-by tourist as he follows Valerian and Laureline through these various realms.

Generally speaking, Besson works at a fast clip, using dynamic framing and tight editing to convey loads of visual information on the go. The movie is designed to propel us from one cliffhanger to the next, and it’s remarkably effective at doing so without providing a clear notion of what the duo’s mission is supposed to be. Early on, they’re sent to Big Market, a massive virtual-reality bazaar where Valerian manages to retrieve an adorable, ultra-rare creature known as a Mül Converter, which can make copies of anything it ingests (except itself, apparently), from a Jabba the Hutt-like black marketeer voiced by John Goodman.

The movie kicks in during the Big Market sequence, which is where audiences first feel like we’re discovering a truly visionary new environment for the first time — though Besson manages to sustain that effect throughout the film’s time on Alpha. There we meet Commander Arun Filitt (Clive Owen), the four-star general who’s been using Valerian to help fulfill his own dastardly agenda, and discover a world of eye-popping costumes. Besson’s script may occasionally leave something to be desired, but one can hardly fault the way his characters are dressed, as costume designer Olivier Bériot gives us a sample of the future of fashion (so avant garde that it could take decades for sci-fi to catch up).

In one case — that of a glampod named Bubble (played by Rihanna, when in human form) — a shape-shifting alien actually functions as a kind of elaborate costume, wrapping herself around Valerian so he can infiltrate the dangerous gourmands who plan to eat his darling Laureline. In a nifty trick, Bubble can remove her hat and change outfits entirely, making for the galaxy’s sexiest exotic dance routine.

Even Besson, who convinced the world that Milla Jovovich could act (in “The Fifth Element”), can’t salvage Rihanna’s awkward line readings — unless that’s the effect this sophisticated, Shakespeare-trained glampod is going for. But that’s a small hiccup considering what the director gets from Delevingne: She doesn’t just save Alpha; she saves the movie as well. And though audiences may not be clamoring for a “Valerian” sequel after this, another “Laureline” adventure would be most welcome.

Reviewed at Regal L.A. Live, July 7, 2017. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 137 MIN.

Production: (France) An STX Entertainment (in U.S.), EuropaCorp (in France) release and presentation of a Valerian SAS, TF1 Films Prod. co-production, with the participation of OCS, TF1, in association with Fundamental Films, BNP Paribas, Orange Studio, Universum Film GmbH, Novo Pictures, River Road Entertainment, Belga Films. Producers: Luc Besson, Virginie Besson-Silla.
Crew: Director: Luc Besson. Screenplay: Besson, based on the comic book series “Valerian and Laureline” by Pierre Christin, Jean-Claude Mézières. Camera (color, widescreen, 3D): Thierry Arbogast. Editor: Julien Rey. Music: Alexandre Desplat.
With: Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Kris Wu, Rutger Hauer, Sasha Luss, Aymeline Valade.

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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Is a One-of-a-Kind Space Odyssey

Luc Besson’s new sci-fi epic is a visual sensation that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a film that refuses to let a single action sequence play out simply. Its director, Luc Besson, has long excelled at set pieces with a twist—think of the backwards car chase in his last feature, Lucy. But for his newest project, he’s painting on a far grander canvas: A tense showdown at an alien bazaar unfolds in two different dimensions that exist in the same space. In a chase scene, the movie’s hero has to blast straight through dozens of walls in a space station to have any hope of catching his quarry. A high-dive rescue mission gets complicated by the presence of aliens fishing for humans with giant poles.

In an era of expensive, paint-by-numbers blockbusters, Besson’s latest, and biggest, film is a day-glo delight, a true original that deserves to be remembered despite—or perhaps partly because of—its various silly excesses. The movie is based on the landmark French comic series Valérian and Laureline , a ’60s pop sci-fi classic about two “spatio-temporal agents” who travel the galaxy together fighting crime. To do this widely beloved work justice, Besson has aimed as high as possible, delivering a $200 million-plus epic that hardly lets a minute go by without lobbing some new bit of visual trickery at the viewer.

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Valerian is the rare film I’d actually recommend trying to see in 3-D; the effects, while plentiful, are rendered with gorgeous clarity. Like a lot of Besson’s work, it’ll probably largely be dismissed as a stylish mess upon release, eventually becoming a cult classic one can imagine captivating midnight theater-goers for decades to come. But Valerian is animated by the same humanist impulses that have driven all of Besson’s best movies—from Léon: The Professional to The Fifth Element —and it has much more to offer than just dizzying spectacle.

Valerian opens with a wonderful montage charting the creation of the massive interstellar city of the film’s title, Alpha—a conglomeration of space stations and hundreds of alien races that has slowly grown over the centuries. But the story is also concerned with an unnamed paradise planet, populated by big-eyed, gem-farming aliens, that was destroyed in a mysterious cataclysm. That Armageddon event is somehow tied to strange goings-on at Alpha, and it’s up to the space-soldiers Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne) to investigate.

The dastardly plot at the center of it all is straightforward enough. But Besson (who also wrote the script) layers in absurd side stories and complicated pieces of world-building, much of it surely straight from the comics, to keep the film’s hefty 137-minute running time from feeling slack. After the early mission at the multi-dimensional bazaar, both Valerian and Laureline get to indulge in their own solo missions and interact with various wacky supporting characters (the most important of whom is Bubble, a shape-shifting alien played by Rihanna) before finally solving the main puzzle of the doomed beach planet.

The convoluted plotting and manic visuals are easy enough to get on board with, especially if you’re fond of space operas like Star Wars ( Valerian especially reminded me of George Lucas’s prequels, except it knows how to have fun) or the Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending . But, as with those movies, the dialogue is at times overly expositional, and attempts at humor or romance can be remote and clunky—Besson’s skill as a writer has never been his banter, which this film has plenty of, especially when it’s introducing the dynamic between Valerian and Laureline.

But stick with it through its awkward early moments, and Valerian will yield deeper insights into Besson’s overall artistic philosophy. DeHaan’s deadpan work quickly grew on me once I understood the arc he was going for: a hard-bitten soldier becoming more comfortable with disobeying orders in the name of the greater good. I hadn’t bought the hype on Delevingne as a movie star before now—her biggest roles were in the young-adult drama Paper Towns and the train wreck that was Suicide Squad —but she’s magnetic here, perfectly embodying Besson’s conception of heroism (which tends to be more open-hearted than the wise-cracking, aloof version typical of Hollywood movies).

Valerian is the kind of science-fiction film that doesn’t get made enough anymore. It’s unafraid to embrace the expansive potential of its genre, to make each new location, costume, and alien creature feel like the wildest version of itself. Besson’s ambitions remain as limitless as they were in his first go-round at the genre, 20 years ago, and they may doom Valerian to “intriguing curio” status rather than out-of-the-box sensation. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Valerian deserves to be seen by as many people as possible, a cinema experience that takes advantage of every moment it has with you.

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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Is an Endearing, Eye-Popping Mess

Like any movie-obsessed teenagers, my sister and I had a cherished repertory of films that we watched over and over again, discovering new nuances each time. One major favorite was The Fifth Element, Luc Besson’s 1997 masterpiece, a sci-fi/action wonderment stuffed full of oddball style and weirdo Euro humor. As we got older and my sister‘s movie taste began to diverge from mine—I was way more into action and sci-fi than she was—it got harder to compromise on what to rent on any given weekend. But The Fifth Element —an adventure about a grizzled cop (a perhaps never-better Bruce Willis ) and the beautiful deity (a certainly never-better Milla Jovovich ) he’s reluctantly sworn to protect—has something for everyone, from bracing gun battles to eerily beautiful musical numbers to whatever kind of gay Southern-fried camp Gary Oldman is doing. My sister and I were equally enthralled by Besson’s strange and glorious vision, a thrilling and unexpectedly moving art-piece whose high-‘90s-ness has somehow preserved it as a timeless classic, rather than quickly turning it into a dated relic.

In the ensuing years, Besson has produced some fun movies—like Taken and Brick Mansions —but as a director, only his silly evolution actioner Lucy has come close to the giddy pleasures of The Fifth Element. So when it was announced that Besson was headed back to space to mount an adaptation of the French sci-fi comic series Valerian and Laureline, I was cautiously optimistic. Perhaps the distant future in far-flung reaches of the galaxy is the best home for Besson’s fantastical whims, where a film is not bound by the conventions of credibility or anything else so boring and pedantic and terrestrial. Perhaps that fanciful French verve, so gleefully abundant in The Fifth Element, would truly live again—meaning, I would be young again. (That’s how movies work, right?)

The resulting adaptation, the new film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (opening July 21), delivers on that promise for maybe its first hour. Eye-popping and in nearly ceaseless motion, Besson’s film has The Fifth Element ’s same syncopated rhythm, a similarly whizzing narrative that introduces exposition in a frenetic flurry as it bounces and careens along. An early scene in which space cops (of a sort) Valerian ( Dane DeHaan, doing a solid Keanu) and Laureline ( Cara Delevingne, uneven, but effective when she’s on) go to a kind of inter-dimensional bazaar, switching in and out of different planes of existence (sort of) as they pursue a cherished object, is an absolute marvel, clever and kitschy and suspenseful. Besson can still stage a hell of a set piece, keeping track of a vast physical space and an array of small details with the ease and invention of a pro.

Valerian ’s world has an engrossing mythology, detailing an uneasy federation of alien races who have all coalesced around a drifting space station that has been added on to and added on to for centuries. This jumble of life and machinery is a perfect terrarium for Besson’s impulsive flourishes; he gives dimension to the world of the source material, while indulging his own unique idiosyncrasies. It’s a real treat just gliding around Besson’s environs with Valerian and Laureline. DeHaan and Delevingne’s stiffness—and the stilted, Google Translate-y cadence of the script—give the film the winking snap of an arch B-movie, in on the joke and having fun with its dispensing of irony and embracing of goofiness. That’s all stuff I can root for, as it’s part of what makes The Fifth Element so enjoyable to watch too.

But, oof. Somewhere about halfway through Valerian, Besson’s aesthetics lose their power to overwhelm—and we’re left grappling with his storytelling, which is cluttered, meandering, inert. Valerian is about a doomed alien people and a government conspiracy to cover up the ruination of their planet. There’s plenty of material there for a movie to mine, mixing some heft in with the playfulness, just as Fifth Element did. But Besson focuses his energies on too many needless digressions that bear little fruit. He’s rambling, and the film suffers for it. Most glaring of all is an unbearably clunky stretch of the film involving Rihanna as a shapeshifting and bizarrely (not in the good way) wisecracking burlesque performer, and a horde of slobbering and stupid aliens who are, rather uncomfortably, clad in tribal garb that looks a bit too much like stuff that’s worn here on Earth by non-white people. It’s an ugly portion of the movie, in many senses, while Besson’s whopping $180 million budget runs thin and the narrative slows to a crawl.

There’s an increasingly perfunctory quality to the film as it goes on. Besson exhausts his neato pictures and is left to limply entertain us with the noodliest of plots. Making things worse, he manically sprinkles it all with comedy that is, I think, aiming for something like quaint and quirky, but instead makes one pull one’s collar and make a cringing sound. All this flailing lays bare a lot of the movie’s inherent problems. It’s at this point when we really see the limits of Delevingne’s range, when DeHaan’s “Space, brah” delivery starts to grate, and when the messy, over-excited tone of Besson’s filmmaking loses its crucial charm.

The movie—quite frankly, quite sadly—falls apart, clattering into pieces as it tumbles toward the finish line. It gets there, with a trace of its initially winning elan still intact. But just barely. The Fifth Element ends in crisp and dazzling and sexy fashion. Valerian wheezes to a close and then gives us a sloppy, oafish grin, one that, much like an ugly dog, both endears and repulses. (The ungainly flirtation between Valerian and Laureline, so full of creaky gender tropes, gets a resolution that is almost cute, but also kinda gross.)

I bear no ill will toward Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. It’s just a disappointment. Though, not an entirely surprising one. Besson—cobbling together his blockbuster budget without the help of any major studio —has taken on a big, ambitious project, and staked a lot on it. Movies like that—such rickety, complicated labors of love—often find the filmmaker losing their way inside their own circus tent. Just look at the Wachowski sisters. The kind of grand, heart-on-the-sleeve movies they tend to make, and Besson makes, are hard to hate. Instead, watching these filmmakers take wild swings that don’t connect, you feel a stab of pity, of guilt (for not liking it more), of a kind of tarnished hope.

The good news with projects like Valerian, though, is that they tend to find their ardent fans eventually. The Fifth Element was something of a disappointment at the American box office, but went on to become a global hit and a cult sensation here at home. So we shouldn’t feel too bad, or too worried, for Valerian just yet. Someone’s bound to love it. Which—with its panting eagerness, its strained moxie, its vaudeville mugging—is maybe really all it wants.

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Chief critic.

‘Valerian’ Reviews Range From ‘Mind-Meltingly Beautiful’ to ‘Dramatically Clunky’

Critics are confounded by Luc Besson’s wild sci-fi epic, and reactions are as vast as the universe itself

STX/EuropaCorp’s “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” has completely confounded movie critics, who have had a wide range of opinions about the dense sci-fi fantasy created by cult hit director Luc Besson.

With early reviews still coming in, “Valerian” currently has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 73 percent, with critics’ opinions varying wildly depending on what element of the film they’re discussing. Most seem to agree that the movie’s visuals are fiercely, unapologetically original, with some even saying they exceed those of James Gunn’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” films.

But others criticize the film’s wild tonal shifts and relentlessly fast-paced plot, which they say some moviegoers will find alienating. What’s more, Dave Schilling of Birth.Movies.Death. says that Besson’s film doesn’t seem to care if you can’t keep up with it.

“‘Valerian’ is like getting slapped in the ass with a bedazzled lawn gnome. It’s either your thing or it isn’t, but you will remember it forever,” he writes. “As Hollywood wrings its hands over a perceived ‘ franchise fatigue’ and audiences beg for fresh ideas, ‘Valerian’ offers that breath of fresh air people are craving.”

Schilling adds: “But what film fans and critics are really asking for usually isn’t something actively strange, it’s an old idea with a new coat of paint or a film like ‘Baby Driver’ that taps into warm and fuzzy feelings of nostalgia and breathless teen romance. The only thing ‘Valerian’ taps into is the boundless imagination of Luc Besson and the stories he was obsessed with as a child.”

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“Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” hits theaters July 21. For more of the wide range of opinions the space epic has spawned, check out more of the reviews here:

Alonso Duralde, TheWrap

“‘Valerian’ might well represent the apotheosis of Besson’s singularly loony brand of filmmaking. It’s bonkers and gorgeous and confusing and thrilling and tiring and overflowing with ideas. This is the kind of movie that soars beyond adjectives like ‘good’ or ‘bad’: It’s sincere but overstuffed, visually gorgeous but dramatically clunky, and it represents a singular vision while simultaneously featuring two wildly miscast actors in the lead roles.”

Bilge Ebiri, Village Voice

“‘Valerian’ is at times so mind-meltingly beautiful and strange that I’m still not sure I didn’t just dream it all. My favorite bit involves the mundanely named Big Market, a cluttered, multilevel, Möbius-inspired mall city of a million shops — think Istanbul’s Covered Bazaar meets the Death Star — that exists in another dimension, so that you have to enter it via special glasses and gloves.”

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger

“‘Valerian’ isn’t a children’s film, exactly. But it’s certainly a childish one, full of ridiculous alien creatures, hammy human performances and characters as deep as strip of celluloid. It’s like “Barbarella” without the ’60s camp and zipless sex. And what fun is that?”

Susana Polo, Polygon

“Often, ‘Valerian’ seems to treat itself as an excuse to show as many wild things to the audience as quickly as possible. And as long as it is showing you those wild things — and they are just as wild and creative and wondrous as any fan of ‘The Fifth Element,’ ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Doctor Who’ could ask for — Valerian succeeds.

It’s when ‘Valerian’ stops to explain anything, or when it pauses to give the relationship between its leads any screen time, that its interstellar flight starts to feel the inexorable pull of gravity. And beyond a certain point, Valerian traps itself in the stale atmosphere of its underwritten dialogue and its director’s love of some adventure fiction cliches better left to gather dust.”

David Ehrlich, IndieWire

“‘Valerian’ imagines a multi-cultural future where diversity has assumed extraterrestrial dimensions, where life is so varied and fractured that entire species can be wiped away without anyone asking questions. Besson presents a future in which people are the least interesting things in the universe, and yet the world still revolves around us. A white dude is still pulling the strings of power. Equality is still hard because erasure is still easier. There are 394 million stories on the City of a Thousand Planets, and Valerian’s might be the only one we’ve seen before. Still, any excuse to visit this place is one worth taking.”

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‘valerian and the city of a thousand planets’: film review.

Luc Besson's new sci-fi extravaganza 'Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets' stars Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne as 28th-century operatives racing to save the universe.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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The Razzies don’t need to wait until the end of the year to anoint a winner for 2017. T he Golden Turkey Awards should be republished with a new cover. Euro-trash is back, while sci-fi will need to lick its wounds for a while. Dane DeHaan , who has starred in two of the most egregiously bloated misfires of the year with A Cure for Wellness and now this, should do a couple of indie films, while Cara Delevingne needs to learn there is more to acting than smirking and eye-rolling. Rihanna should pretend this never happened. And the Hollywood studio chiefs can breathe easy that, this time, at least, they’ll escape blame for making a giant summer franchise picture that nobody wants to see, since this one’s a French import.

Yes, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets really is that bad, bad enough that you don’t know for the longest time that Valerian is one of the lead characters and not a planet or a spaceship. Sporting special effects and sets that smack of 50-year-old Barbarella -style tackiness , Luc Besson ‘s $200-million eyesore will barely trigger a momentary blip on the American box-office radar screen, leaving Besson with the lone hope that there are parts of the world where the entertainment tastes remain, ahem, less discriminating.

Release date: Jul 21, 2017

The comic book-based Valerian et Laureline, created by Pierre Christin and drawn by Jean-Claude Mezieres, was a fan favorite in Europe from its debut in 1967 through 21 volumes, ending in 2010. For whatever reason, Besson hasn’t cast leads who remotely approximate the looks of the comics’ characters; Valerian on the page is a black-haired he-man, not a brownish-blond kid with the physique of a 1950s teenager, while Laureline’s flaming long red hair has not been adopted by cat-like blonde model Delevingne.

Luc Besson Unveils Exclusive 'Valerian' Footage at CineEurope

Along the way, there’s a pit-stop in a naughty district, where a guy named Jolly the Pimp (a brassy Ethan Hawke) draws back the curtain on a singer-dancer of shape-shifting talents (Rihanna) and, ultimately, a bad guy does emerge in the form of the top-dog military commander (Clive Owen). But by this time, most viewers will have long since checked out, as nothing ever seems remotely at stake due to a narrative whose navigator has lost his way and a drummer who’s dropped both sticks.

The 3D here proves largely inconsequential but at least provides a minor distraction from the looming creative void.

Production companies: Valerian S.A.S., TF1 Films Distributor: STX Films Cast: Dane Dehaan , Cara Delevingne , Clive Owen, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Kris Wu, Sam Spruell, Alain Chabat, Rutger Hauer Director: Luc Besson Screenwriter: Luc Besson, based on the comic book series Valerian and Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Meziers Producers: Luc Besson, Virginie Besson-Silla Executive producers: Mark Gao, Gregory Ouanhon, JC Cheng Director of photography: Thierry Arbogast Production designer: Hugues Tissandier Costume designer: Olivier Beriot Editor: Julien Rey Music: Alexandre Desplat Visual effects supervisor: Scott Stokdyk Casting: Nathalie Cheron-Arda

Rated PG-13, 137 minutes

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Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets Review

21 Jul 2017

Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets

Luc Besson’s latest is something he’s been itching to make for more than 20 years. It’s based on comic strips that fired his imagination as a petit garçon (the Star Wars -influencing Valérian And Laureline , by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières). It’s enabled him to let loose with digital techniques he wished he'd had back on The Fifth Element . And he’s made it on his own terms, free of any studio interference, despite the production’s whopping $180 million budget. In short, Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets is the most ambitious and colossally risky cinematic endeavour since James Cameron made Avatar .

The result is a breathless, boundless candy-neon pinball-machine theme-park freak-out so lacking in any sense of creative restraint that it makes most other space operas look shabby and timid. If you thought Jupiter Ascending was visually conservative and insufficiently bewildering, or that The Force Awakens would have been improved by a five-minute sequence in which Rihanna pole-dances as a shapeshifting prostitute, then Valerian is the movie for you. With jellyfish that eat memories, aquatic monsters the size of cathedrals and a bazaar so bizarre its exists simultaneously in different dimensions, it’s like Guardians Of The Galaxy might have turned out if James Gunn were a being made of pure mescaline.

So on one level, you have to applaud Besson. This is world-building where not even the sky is the limit and every frame is stuffed with mad-genius invention. It’s the oil on canvas to The Fifth Element ’s doodle on a beer mat. But what’s missing is… well… everything else. Story. Character. Coherence. A sense of pace, even.

Every frame is stuffed with mad-genius invention.

At two-and-a-quarter hours long, Valerian is a marathon run at a sprint. It's exhausting. During those rare, nano-moments where oh-so-pretty leads Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne slow down to talk and flirt, they communicate only in leaden cliché-ese. “My heart will belong to you and no-one else,” blahs Valerian; “You’re scared of commitment,” Laureline drones in response. Besson may be able to marshal the mighty forces of VFX to artfully craft any weirdo monster or spaceship his distended subconscious can squirt out, but he can't create any chemistry between these two. DeHaan, a damn fine actor who's best employed as the wan, moody outsider, is desperately miscast as the supposedly suave, jet-booted hero. Delevingne is given little more to do than pout, glower and punch Clive Owen repeatedly. There’s no sense of depth or history to this couple, no reason to care for either their mission or their ersatz romance.

As for the plot they have to propel, once you strip away all the shiny, greeble-covered cladding, it’s flimsier than a bottle rocket attempting re-entry. There’s a cute alien critter our heroes have to rescue from a place. Then they take it to another place, where aliens who look like supermodels want the cute critter back. That’s pretty much it, and yet somehow you still feel befuddled. Might be something to do with all those bubblegum-firing guns and phosphorescent butterflies and fat-bottomed frog monsters, and that bit where Delevingne wears the galaxy's biggest hat.

The sad truth is, once the giddy novelty of riding dodgems in Besson’s psychedelic space-carnival wanes, it all becomes quite grating (and watching it in eye-sandblasting 3D really doesn’t help). Almost enough to make you want to grab the nearest memory-eating jellyfish.

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Review: ‘Valerian’ Is a Rave in Space (but Not Much Fun)

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By A.O. Scott

July 20, 2017

Much as I hesitate to predict the future in such crazy times, I feel I can say with certainty that 2017 will go down in film history as the Year of the Crazy Dane DeHaan Movie. Already so far we have seen Mr. DeHaan, a 31-year-old actor endowed with poise, intelligence and superb eyebrows, in Gore Verbinski’s highly puzzling “A Cure for Wellness.” If you missed that one, it was more or less “ The Magic Mountain ” with incest and bloodsucking eels.

“Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” Mr. DeHaan’s latest eyebrow-raiser — speaking of which, it also stars Cara Delevingne, perhaps the supreme superciliary celebrity of our time — is a bit harder to describe. It was written and directed by Luc Besson (“The Fifth Element,” “Arthur and the Invisibles”) a fact that promises greater emphasis on visual panache than on feeling or coherence.

That promise is faithfully kept, but there is so much more going on. To say that “Valerian” is a science-fiction epic doesn’t quite do it justice. Imagine crushing a DVD of “The Phantom Menace” into a fine powder, tossing in some Adderall and Ecstasy and a pinch of cayenne pepper and snorting the resulting mixture while wearing a virtual reality helmet in a Las Vegas karaoke bar. Actually, that sounds like too much fun, but you get the idea.

Mr. DeHaan plays Valerian and Ms. Delevingne plays Laureline, who are not his-and-hers dental hygiene products but rather soldiers in some kind of space army. They are also at least potentially a couple, a fact which authorizes a lot of dialogue that might technically be called “banter” but that seems to have lost its snap after passing through Google translate a few times too many. Anyway, Valerian and Laureline are as cute as a pair of baby salamanders.

Their mission — do I have to do this part? — involves justice for the planet Mül. Before it was destroyed, Mül was a beachy paradise, a perpetual Ibiza on the morning after the best rave ever, populated by hairless lizard supermodels. The key to their bliss is a pocket-size dinosaur that excretes pearls. Only one is left in the universe. Valerian and Laureline are its intrepid pet-sitters.

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Valerian and the city of a thousand planets.

Common Sense Says
Parents Say 22 Reviews
Kids Say 22 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Silly but exuberant sci-fi adventure has fantasy violence.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 11+?

Plenty of fantasy violence; lots of futuristic guns (lasers, etc.) and shooting,

A use of "s--t" (partly obscured by noise). Also "pr--k," &q

A character does a sexy dance involving a stripper pole. Kissing. Main character

Any Positive Content?

Concepts of kindness, sharing, and helping the less fortunate are celebrated (as

The characters are rogues and rascals who often turn to violence to solve their

Violence & Scariness

Plenty of fantasy violence; lots of futuristic guns (lasers, etc.) and shooting, with little real impact and virtually no blood. Fight scenes. An alien creature is questioned and tortured, tied up in chair. Digital monsters.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

A use of "s--t" (partly obscured by noise). Also "pr--k," "ass," and "damn."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A character does a sexy dance involving a stripper pole. Kissing. Main characters in bathing suits. One character asks another to marry him several times. Main character enters a red-light district; other characters flirt with him. A central character is described as a lady-killer.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Concepts of kindness, sharing, and helping the less fortunate are celebrated (as opposed to selfishness and lying). Briefly mentions environmental concerns, specifically giving back as much as you take. Addresses the idea of trusting your instincts over your orders. Courage and teamwork are themes.

Positive Role Models

The characters are rogues and rascals who often turn to violence to solve their problems. But they generally try to do the right thing. One main character must decide whether to be loyal to his organization or do the right thing. The main female character constantly challenges her position as the male's sidekick; she firmly believes that she's capable of doing all the hero stuff, too.

Parents need to know that Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a sci-fi/action movie based on French comics and directed by Luc Besson . There's plenty of fantasy violence, with futuristic guns, shooting, and fighting, but virtually no blood. An alien character is strapped to a chair and questioned (possibly tortured). The main characters eventually kiss, and one spends the movie asking the other to marry him. There's a red-light district with flirty characters and a woman doing a sexy dance involving a stripper pole. Language includes one possible use of "s--t" (it's partly obscured by noise) and uses of "ass" and "damn." Though the movie is very long and quite silly, it's also bright and dazzling and fun, with messages about courage, teamwork, environmentalism, and helping the less fortunate. And the main female character ( Cara Delevingne ) constantly challenges her position as the male's sidekick. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

Parents say (22)
Kids say (22)

Based on 22 parent reviews

Not appropriate for young children

Stripper pole okay for 11+, what's the story.

In VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS, it's the 28th century, and agent Valerian ( Dane DeHaan ) has a strange vision about an alien race. He and his intrepid partner, Laureline ( Cara Delevingne ), are sent on a mission to a huge, interdimensional black market to retrieve a miraculous little creature that can multiply matter with its body. Then, returning to Alpha (an interconnected series of ships populated by thousands of races, aka "the city of a thousand planets"), the heroes discover that it's under attack, with a strange radioactive zone spreading from its core. Eventually, Valerian and Laureline discover that there's a connection between Valerian's vision and the threat. Worse, they discover that there's a huge cover-up -- and it goes all the way to the top.

Is It Any Good?

Expensive and impressively, colorfully designed, this sci-fi/action movie is frequently silly and not always very smart, but it has a joyous exuberance and a sheer, dizzy love of the genre. Written and directed by Luc Besson and based on French comics by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets feels directly inspired by Star Wars , as if it were riding a wave of enthusiasm spurred by that film's 1977 release. It's an homage that might have been conceived by Roger Corman , by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus at Cannon Films, or even by a kid in the backyard. The only differences are that it has a $200 million budget, and it's way, way too long.

Some of the movie's images -- such as an immense marketplace in an alternate dimension, or the complex structure of Alpha itself -- are absolutely breathtaking. And Besson's action and chase sequences are bright and snappy, with touches of swaggering humor (helped by Alexandre Desplat's full-blooded, jaunty score). Model-turned-actress Delevingne isn't a great thespian, but her presence has a Barbarella / Galaxina quality, with a bit of Bond girl thrown in. Meanwhile, while DeHaan is fine in introspective indies, he doesn't seem quite right as a Han Solo space-cowboy type. But most quibbles of this kind are easily forgiven, thanks to the movie's overall cheery spirit and positive vibe.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets 's violence . Does the fact that it's largely bloodless -- and that it uses futuristic technology -- make it less intense? Why or why not? What's the impact of media violence on kids?

Did you notice any examples of kindness, sharing, and helping others in the movie? Do you think the movie promotes compassion ?

Who are the movie's heroes? What makes them heroes? Are Valerian and Laureline role models ? How do they demonstrate courage ? Teamwork ?

Laureline frequently challenges her position as Valerian's sidekick. Do you agree with her? How would you describe her role? How does she compare to other female characters you've seen in sci-fi/adventure movies?

How does science fiction help tell stories about who we are and what's going on now?

Movie Details

In theaters : July 21, 2017
On DVD or streaming : November 21, 2017
Cast : Dane DeHaan , Cara Delevingne , Clive Owen
Director : Luc Besson
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Pansexual actors, Queer actors
Studios : STX Entertainment , Lionsgate
Genre : Science Fiction
Topics : Adventures , Space and Aliens
Character Strengths : Courage , Teamwork
Run time : 137 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : sci-fi violence and action, suggestive material and brief language
Last updated : February 23, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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DVD & Streaming

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Action/Adventure , Drama , War

Content Caution

In Theaters

July 21, 2017
Dane DeHaan as Major Valerian; Cara Delevingne as Sergeant Laureline; Clive Owen as Commander Arun Filitt; Rihanna as Bubble; Ethan Hawke as Jolly the Pimp; Herbie Hancock as Defence Minister; Sam Spruell as General Okto-Bar; Rutger Hauer as President of the World State Federation

Home Release Date

November 21, 2017

Distributor

EuropaCorp, STX Entertainment

Movie Review

Some jobs are easier than others. Just ask Major Valerian, an agent of Earth’s World State Federation in the 28th century: He never gets the easy ones.

Today’s assignment, for instance? Traveling through Exo Space with new partner Sergeant Laureline to the desert tourist planet Kyrian in search of a so-called converter : a small, cute, dragonish creature that, when it eats something, excretes exact duplicates of the same. Lots of ’em. Put in diamonds, and hundreds of shiny, cut carats pop out of the backside of the thing, immediately. It’s not hard to understand why the little beastie—supposedly the last of its kind—is coveted by all manner of not-so-nice intergalactic entities.

To retrieve it, Valerian will need to don special glasses and a boxlike contraption that enables him to enter a parallel dimension while Lauraline directs him back.

Despite being pursued in two different dimensions by ugly aliens and an even uglier dog-like monster, Valerian and Laureline manage to nab the converter … a cute lil’ guy that proves to be of even greater importance than either of them realize.

And that’s just the beginning of their dizzying, frenetic adventure.

Valerian and Laureline soon travel to the floating space colony Alpha—known colloquially as the City of a Thousand Planets—ostensibly to deliver the converter to the man in charge there, Commander Filitt. They’re also tasked with protecting him from hostiles who might want to get their hands (or claws or tentacles or extra-dimensional molecules) on the converter themselves.

But once they arrive on Alpha—a constantly evolving world that’s home to multiple ecosystems, thousands of alien species and some 30 million inhabitants—Valerian and Laureline begin to suspect that the man they report to isn’t telling the truth about … well, something . Something apparently related to the converter, which Laureline decides to hold onto herself.

As they follow clues about what’s really happening, Valerian and Laureline discover a cover-up of planetary proportions. It involves a race of ethereal, human-like aliens known as the Pearl whose home world of Mül was obliterated in a battle some 30 years before. Only a handful remain. And if they’re ever truly going to thrive again as a species, they’re going to need their converter back.

The same little dragon that seemingly everyone on Alpha is frantically looking for.

Positive Elements

Valerian and Laureline are conscientious, faithful agents of the World State Federation. They’re very good at their jobs, and they’ll do just about anything—including risking their lives—to see a mission through to completion. They’re also similarly loyal to each other—so much so, in fact, that Valerian repeatedly pursues a romantic and even marital relationship with Laureline (more on that below). They’re forced to rescue each other frequently. As it becomes more and more obvious that the Commander’s got some dark secrets, the pair confronts him about his misdeeds. (It’s obvious to the audience from the almost the beginning that he’s a bad guy, but characters in the film don’t discover that truth quite so quickly.)

Valerian eventually has to make a choice between following orders and helping the Pearl species make a fresh, new start. Laureline must convince him that the loving decision is to help the alien race, not stick to the rules. “You really don’t know what love is,” she chides him. “Love is more powerful than anything else.” Once he agrees, Laureline tells the Pearls, “We [human beings] are to blame for the loss of your planet. And we’d be honored to help you get it back.”

Mül is depicted as a peaceful, unsullied paradise where the Pearl people live in perfect harmony with one another and their environment. A conflict between humans and another unidentified alien group results in the destruction of Mül. As such, humans are depicted as defilers of the Pearl’s previously perfect and pure civilization.

Elsewhere in the film, Valerian meets female shapeshifter Bubbles (played by singer Rihanna) who helps Valerian in his quest. Along the way, Valerian affirms her value and identity apart from the “work” she’s essentially forced to do. And she heroically helps Valerian rescue Laureline from aliens.

Spiritual Elements

We see a Pearl religious rite (which is performed three times annually, we learn later) in which a young woman feeds the converter a—wait for it—giant pearl, which prompts the creature to secrete many more back into a mystical well. As this happens, we hear a prayer of sorts: “Let us give back to nature that which she gave to us.”

When a Pearl dies, the spirit of that being is dispersed in a wave of energy across the universe and time as it seeks a worthy host to reside in after death. The daughter of the Pearl emperor is killed in a blast early in the film, and she chooses to take refuge inside Valerian, which he does not know at first. When he finally figures it out, he tells Laureline, “The princess, she’s guiding me.” To which Laureline responds, “You’ve had a woman inside you since the beginning?”

The Pearl royal couple is able to see the ghostly form of their daughter within Valerian. One tells him, “[She] chose you to be the guardian of her soul.” Later we also hear that the deceased princess is about to pass on to some final spiritual rest. “Our daughter made a good choice. She can rest in peace now.”

Someone says, “Godspeed.”

Sexual & Romantic Content

Valerian is interested in pursuing a relationship with Laureline. He flirts with her incessantly (at one point even climbing over the top of her while the two sunbathe in a beach simulator). She knows of his promiscuous past (he has what he calls a “playlist” of former lovers, and we see their portraits projected on to multiple walls of a spaceship at one point); she’s not willing to entertain the idea of a relationship until he renounces and destroys his “playlist.”

Eventually, Valerian ups the ante and proposes marriage, with Laureline still feigning some resistance. Eventually she becomes convinced of his love, and the two get “married” (even though they’re in a drifting spaceship awaiting rescue). They kiss passionately at that point (and less so earlier in the film). Laureline wears a bikini top early on.

While pursuing aliens who’ve captured Laureline, Valerian is told he can only find a shapeshifter’s help in what’s essentially Alpha’s red-light district, a place known as Paradise Alley. Multiple scantily clad, alien-but-human-looking prostitutes try to tempt him into spending his money on them.

Bubble’s ne’er-do-well slavemaster Jolly the Pimp tries to sell Valerian on Bubbles’ ability to please him, though Valerian’s not there to be a customer for a sex show. That said, Valerian’s eyes indicate moments of temptation and attraction as he watches Bubbles shapeshift through various very revealing costumes (in actress Rihanna’s human form). A lengthy pole dancing scene is even more revealing, though (skimpy) undergarments are never removed.

The Pearl, for their part, wear almost nothing. While they’re not human, their physique for the most part resembles ours (albeit much thinner). The females often wear tops that just barely cover their breasts.

Violent Content

The action almost never lets up over the course of Valerian ‘s 137-minute run time. Violence is almost as constant, though mostly of the comic book-ish variety. Valerian and Laureline tangle with all manner of aliens, humans, monsters and just about everything else—with bloodless casualties among all of the above. High-tech shootouts, chases and melees all get woven together into a seamless thread of continual, often explosive movement. We see humans and aliens flying, running, jumping, falling through walls, through floors, through space. Several scenes involve epic space battles as well, one of which consumes a planet.

A couple of more intense scenes are worth noting. The Commander captures a Pearl alien. We see the Pearl bloodied and bound to a chair, with the implication that he’s being tortured (though we don’t actually see it). Laureline later pummels the Commander in the face with her fists, hitting him hard perhaps half a dozen times. And the Pearl king and queen watch as their daughter, who’s trapped outside the protection of a spaceship, perishes in an explosive fireball. Lethal robots unload on a group of humans and Pearls, with many bodies being shown on the ground, unmoving, afterward.

In yet another scene, Laureline (who’s been captured) brings an alien king a meal. She wears a huge, plate-like hat. What she doesn’t know is that her head is protruding through it, and the king intends to eat it. (We see him flexing a nasty rounded blade, presumably to pry her skull open.)

Crude or Profane Language

One clear use of “pr–k.” Perhaps a muffled and indistinct s-word. Three uses of “h—,” two of “a–,” and one each of “d–n” and “pervert” (with the latter uttered as a derogatory accusation).

Drug & Alcohol Content

Characters are shown imbibing what are presumably alcoholic (or similar) beverages on several occasions. In one scene, a boat captain gluttonously chugs down a bottle of champagne.

Other Noteworthy Elements

The converter instantly defecates copies of whatever it eats.

Laureline, trying to locate Valerian, puts a large jellyfish on her head (the creature somehow knows where he is). When she comments about putting its mouth over her head, another character quips, “Actually, it’s not his mouth.”

If you’ve seen French director Luc Besson’s 1997 sci-fi extravaganza The Fifth Element , you’ve got an inkling of what to expect here. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (based on a French sci-fi comic Besson adored as a child) feels like that film to the tenth power. Or on steroids. Or whatever amplification/multiplication/acceleration comparison you want to use.

Put simply, it’s a kaleidoscopic cacophony of crashing, contrasting colors. A hurricane of swirling hues. A tesseract of trans-dimensional wonder. A majestic maelstrom of moving images.

Actually, it’s not simple at all, is it?

The film—which reportedly has a whopping 600 more special effects shots that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story —dazzles visually. The story? Well, not so much. At every turn, it’s as if Besson played some kind of dart-board-plot-point game. Following it, let alone trying to understand how its internal continuity coheres, is just about impossible. Even my introduction is just an approximation of a story that takes as many slamming, banging turns as a hyperactive pinball.

Those aesthetics are what make Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets memorable.

But we also need to focus on some content issues here.

For much of the film, I was thinking that Besson had exercised admirable restraint in terms of both language and sexuality. Then we get to Paradise Alley, where Rihanna’s shapeshifting character puts on a burlesque show of rapidly changing outfits—all of which reveal a great deal of her decidedly human form.

Writing for Rolling Stone , movie reviewer Peter Travers said of the scene, “Ethan Hawke plays a pimp named Jolly, an excuse for the director to indulge his taste for kinky intergalactic sex games, though he even seem [sic] timid about getting his freak on here.”

It’s true that Rihanna’s routine stops short of nudity. Still, the presence of what’s essentially a stripper scene quickly puts to rest the idea of packing up the kids and heading out to the multiplex for this one.

On a more philosophical plane, the film takes an unexpected political turn at the end, too. Bubbles asks, “What good is freedom when you’re an illegal immigrant far away from home?” Later on, the Commander’s dialogue paints him as something of a “wall builder” when it comes to protecting humanity from aliens: “Protecting citizens first” is his priority. He says that if we do not, the influx of aliens will “weaken humanity’s economy.”

It’s not hard to see what Besson is doing here with dialogue like that—a subtext that will likely resonate positively with some and rankle others.

In the end, I thought Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets was a remarkable visual experience. Besson has delivered another tour de force sci-fi actioner, but one that’s ultimately let down by the inclusion of some content near the end that veers in disappointing and wholly unnecessary directions.

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

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The first reviews for Luc Besson's Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets heap praise upon the movie's CGI and spectacle, if not so much its human protagonists. Valerian itself is an adaptation of the French sci-fi comic book series Valérian and Laureline (which turns 50 this year) and follows the misadventures of space/time-traversing crime fighters Valerian and Laureline, as played respectively by Dane DeHaan ( Chronicle , The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ) and Cara Delevingne ( Paper Towns , Suicide Squad ) in Besson's big screen interpretation.

Besson's Valerian adaptation is also hitting the big screen twenty years after the release of his cult classic sci-fi flick The Fifth Element , itself a movie that was heavily inspired by the original Valerian graphic novels (with respect to its aesthetic, in particular). Similar to The Fifth Element , Besson's Valerian movie has thus far inspired critical reactions both enthusiastically positive and unabashedly negative, as well as a number that fall somewhere between those two extremes. However, there's one thing that most everyone appears to agree upon right now and that's that Valerian is visually spectacular .

Related: Valerian Poster Contains a Fifth Element Easter Egg

At the time of writing this, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is holding a 72% Fresh Rating on Rotten Tomatoes after 18 reviews, meaning the critical consensus could easily change (for better or worse) as more reactions are published ahead of the movie's theatrical release next week. To find out more about what critics are saying thus far, read on for some SPOILER-FREE Valerian review excerpts (with links that you can click on for the full reviews).

Variety - Peter Debruge

At a time when “Star Wars” itself has gone corporate... “Valerian” manages to be both cutting-edge and delightfully old-school — the kind of wild, endlessly creative thrill ride that only the director of “Lucy” and “The Fifth Element” could deliver, constructed as an episodic series of missions, scrapes and near-misses featuring a mind-blowing array of environments and stunning computer-generated alien characters. Too bad Valerian himself is such a dud.

THR - Todd McCarthy

The Razzies don't need to wait until the end of the year to anoint a winner for 2017. The Golden Turkey Awards should be republished with a new cover. Euro-trash is back, while sci-fi will need to lick its wounds for a while. Dane DeHaan, who has starred in two of the most egregiously bloated misfires of the year with A Cure for Wellness and now this, should do a couple of indie films, while Cara Delevingne needs to learn there is more to acting than smirking and eye-rolling.

Crave Online - William Bibbiani

It’s a cynical world in which we live, even within our fantasies, and that’s a big part of the reason why Luc Besson’s ambitious sci-fi spectacular Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets plays like a welcome reprieve from literally everything everywhere. It welcomes the audience into a future world full of dangers and conflict, certainly, but also of hope, sensitivity, acceptance and – perhaps most importantly – the most eye-popping imagery imaginable.

Cinema Blend - Eric Eisenberg

The summer isn't quite over, but Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is certainly the frontrunner to be named the spectacle of the summer, and while many franchises have disappointed, this is a movie that ends with you wanting to see much more from the universe it introduces. It's visually stunning, beautifully prescient in its humanist themes (alien-ist too, I suppose?), and while its reach doesn't match its grasp in some respects, you're still left respecting the hell out of the reach alone.

The Playlist - Rodrigo Perez

This is tentpole auteurism. Like “The Fifth Element,” his previous sci-fi touchstone, Besson’s ‘Valerian’ is weird; the director’s eccentric sensibilities permeate every expensive frame and are found in the imaginative technologies and the depiction of cultural alien quirks. The world building is awe-inspiring and the visuals look both unconventional and luxuriously expensive. Unfortunately, this leaves only pennies remaining for the characters, the plot and the rest of the movie.

Forbes - Scott Mendelson

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a jaw-droppingly beautiful and often delightfully exciting sci-fi adventure. Taking place in the not-so-near future, it is (like The Fifth Element before it) an uncommonly optimistic portrait of the future... While the main selling point will be the 3D-friendly spectacle, Besson remembers to root his story in character. Okay, his heroic duo, Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevinge) aren’t exactly classic cinematic creations. But they are a lot of fun to spend time with, which only adds to the razzle-dazzle.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Header

As mentioned earlier, the first wave of reviews for Valerian are all over the place - ranging from "Future Razzie Winner" to "Most Fun Movie of the Summer" - but the overall reception is mostly positive thus far. Besson as a filmmaker is known for having a somewhat-divisive idiosyncratic storytelling approach and tendency to emphasize sensory experiences over rich character drama, as evidenced by his previous efforts with such genre action movies as Lucy (which he both wrote and directed) and his contributions to The Transporter and Taken properties (which he both co-wrote and produced). As such, the initial response to Besson's Valerian adaptation is perhaps to be expected, given both his critical track record and the eccentric source material.

Speaking of which, the Valerian franchise is far from a household name in the U.S. - and with Besson's movie being set to face some tough competition during its opening weekend here in the States (from the likes of Christopher Nolan's WWII thriller Dunkirk ), Valerian would be facing an uphill battle at the box office regardless of its critical reception. The film may yet manage a decent domestic commercial performance, thanks to those moviegoers who are fans of Besson and/or in the mood for some dazzling sci-fi eye candy. However, like a number of tentpoles that have already been released this summer, a sizable turnout at the international box office will likely be essential if Valerian is to recoup its hefty production budget .

NEXT: Final Valerian Movie Trailer

Source: Various (see the above links)

Key Release Dates

'Valerian' Delivers an Extraterrestrial Spectacle (Review)

A heaping dose of extraterrestrial eye candy invades movie theaters across the U.S. today (July 21).

" Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets " is a new science-fiction action film based on the French comic series "Valérian and Laureline." It tells the story of two government agents who travel through space, fighting crime and maintaining order in the universe. Their journey takes them to an intergalactic metropolis known as Alpha Space Station, where thousands of alien species coexist.

Between the diverse populations of spectacular creatures and the huge expanse of alien infrastructure, the sights you'll see throughout this movie are nothing short of impressive. But if you're looking for a captivating story, you won't find it here. [ 9 Exciting Space Movies to Watch in 2017 ]

An extraterrestrial paradise is under attack in this scene from

Considering the fact that "Valerian" is the most expensive independent film ever made, it makes sense to see it filled with beautiful sets, awesome costumes and convincing special effects. In fact, the movie is such a spectacle that it's pretty easy to overlook any shortcomings in the storyline or with character development.

The story begins on the planet Mül, where smiling, shimmery-skinned humanoids known as the Pearls live on a beautiful island paradise. Colorful nebulas paint the skies all colors of the rainbow, and seashells the size of elephants line the beaches.

Instead of dogs and cats, the Pearls keep adorable, goblin-like critters known as "Mül converters" as pets. Not only are these animals arguably the cutest little aliens in the universe, but they also excrete pearly little stones that the Pearl species needs to survive.

An alien on the planet Mül holds a creature known as a converter.

It doesn't take long before there's trouble in paradise. When foreign spacecraft start to fall from the sky, their ethereal planet is destroyed. Some of the Pearls manage to escape — but without any of their precious, superimportant pets.

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Enter Maj. Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Sgt. Laureline (Cara Delevingne), two colleagues and hopeless romantics on a mission to retrieve the last living Mül converter, named Melo, which somehow ended up in the hands of a criminal mastermind who lives in another dimension . The duo fly their spacecraft – which looks like the Millennium Falcon in "Star Wars" — to the desert planet Kirian, where they use creative, high-tech and dangerous tactics to retrieve the little critter.

Valerian and Laureline spend the rest of the film trying to get Melo back to where it belongs, which proves far more complicated than they anticipated. They also spend quite a bit of time getting lost and looking for each other — and arguing about whether they should get married, despite the fact that there doesn't appear to be much chemistry between the two of them. Perhaps the movie would have been better without that awkward, not-so-romantic distraction.

Thankfully, it's easy to forget that you're watching a shabby love story when there's plenty of exciting stuff happening in the movie. There may not be a lot of substance to the plot, but the movie is still absolutely entertaining to watch.

Email Hanneke Weitering at [email protected] or follow her @hannekescience . Follow us @Spacedotcom , Facebook and Google+ . Original article on Space.com .

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.

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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets review: "A formulaic plot and underwhelming leads"

GamesRadar+ Verdict

VFX Oscar glory seems inevitable, but a formulaic plot and underwhelming leads are just two of Valerian’s thousand problems.

Why you can trust GamesRadar+ Our experts review games, movies and tech over countless hours, so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about our reviews policy.

A €200 million price tag. Avatar -rivalling visual ambition. Source material oft-regarded as an influence on Star Wars . Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets arrives with interstellar expectations. While it’s no Jupiter Ascending -style stinker, a dispiritingly conventional screenplay and miscast leads prevent this take on French comic-book series Valérian and Laureline from ever truly taking off.

Not that there isn’t innovation. An early sequence in an inter-dimensional Grand Bazaar is brain-breakingly inventive. Before that a 10-minute, near-silent vignette on a pristine Day-Glo beach planet stuns with its simplicity. And then there’s the opener – a bravura history of humanity’s first contact, from present day to the 28th Century. Taken in isolation, Valerian’s first 30 minutes are up there with the best sci-fi in recent memory. The trouble starts when the story kicks in.

Enter Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne), space agents who police the universe by day and flirt awkwardly by night. Their latest mission takes them to Alpha – a planet-sized city home to 8,000 alien species. But the megalopolis has a literal heart of darkness, where some seemingly belligerent force threatens the fabric of the galaxy itself.

Every penny of that record-breaking (and independently financed) budget has been put on screen. If The Fifth Element ’s taxi skyways knocked your orange suspenders off in 1997, Valerian frequently makes Milla Jovovich’s swan dive look like a pre-production animatic. Besson hurtles his camera through a series of awe-inspiring environments, and populates them with increasingly bizarre alien species.

It’s like A New Hope ’s cantina sequence stretched over two hours, with Rihanna making the biggest impression as Bubble – a meek, shapeshifting stripper – alongside a game Ethan Hawke as her pimp, (not so) Jolly. While the world often acts as little more than a backdrop, screen sci-fi doesn’t get much more optically arresting.

And yet, Besson’s rocketship is knocked off-course. Penned by the Euro auteur himself, the ploddingly predictable story, adapted from 1975 volume ‘Ambassador of the Shadows’, falls well short of the significant achievements elsewhere.

The dialogue, meanwhile, feels clunky even when spoken in indecipherable alien tongues. And the leads also disappoint. DeHaan lacks the cocksure swagger of the Han Solo archetype he’s playing up to, while Delevingne is asked to do little more than be chased or deploy an endless series of exasperated reaction shots.

Besson’s world is undoubtedly ripe for further exploration. But he’d be wise to hone his storytelling, and possibly recast.

I'm the Deputy Editor at Total Film magazine, overseeing the features section of every issue where you can read exclusive, in-depth interviews and see first-look images from the biggest films. I was previously the News Editor at sci-fi, fantasy and horror movie bible SFX. You'll find my name on news, reviews, and features covering every type of movie, from the latest French arthouse release to the biggest Hollywood blockbuster. My work has also featured in Official PlayStation Magazine and Edge.

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COMMENTS

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
Every summer movie season needs at least one out-of-left-field entry that is so cheerfully bonkers it stands as a living rebuke to an industry that churns out noisy and soulless garbage like "Transformers: The Last Knight."This year, that film is "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets," a deliriously entertaining film that finds writer/director Luc Besson swinging for the fences ...
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
In the 28th century, special operatives Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline work together to maintain order throughout the human territories. Under assignment from the minister of defense, the ...
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets: Directed by Luc Besson. With Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Rihanna. A dark force threatens Alpha, a vast metropolis and home to species from a thousand planets. Special operatives Valerian and Laureline must race to identify the marauding menace and safeguard not just Alpha, but the future of the universe.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)
For an international French movie, "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" is a very ambitious project that was covered by an astonishing $200 million budget. Certainly, it has Luc Besson attached to write and direct and it is based on a famous long-running French comic-book series, so how can it go wrong? ... Most reviews have referred ...
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
In the 28th century, Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne) are a team of special operatives charged with maintaining order throughout the human territories. Under assignment from the Minister of Defense, the two embark on a mission to the astonishing city of Alpha—an ever-expanding metropolis where species from all over the universe have converged over centuries to share ...
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4.0 | Sep 26, 2020. Though Luc Besson's usual failings have been amplified by his ambition, that ambition is worth seeing for the extremity of the spectacle alone ...
Film Review: 'Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets'
Written as a kind of cocky intergalactic lothario, Valerian ought to be as sexy and charismatic as a young Han Solo, though "Chronicle" star Dane DeHaan — so good in brooding-emo mode ...
Movie Review: 'Valerian' Is a Must-See Space Odyssey
Valerian is the rare film I'd actually recommend trying to see in 3-D; the effects, while plentiful, are rendered with gorgeous clarity.Like a lot of Besson's work, it'll probably largely be ...
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Review
It's an ugly portion of the movie, in many senses, while Besson's whopping $180 million budget runs thin and the narrative slows to a crawl. There's an increasingly perfunctory quality to ...
'Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets' review: It boldly goes
Movie Review ★ 'Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,' with Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Rihanna, Herbie Hancock. Written and directed by Luc Besson. 137 minutes. Rated ...
'Valerian' Reviews Range From 'Mind-Meltingly Beautiful' to
STX/EuropaCorp's "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" has completely confounded movie critics, who have had a wide range of opinions about the dense sci-fi fantasy created by cult ...
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Review
Where Valerian pops most is in its visuals, creature designs, and world-building. This movie is chock full of visual details to behold in nearly every shot, whether it's showcasing a diverse array ...
'Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets' Review
The comic book-based Valerian et Laureline, created by Pierre Christin and drawn by Jean-Claude Mezieres, was a fan favorite in Europe from its debut in 1967 through 21 volumes, ending in 2010 ...
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Review
It runs 137 minutes and is rated PG-13 for sci-fi violence and action, suggestive material and brief language. Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section! 2.5. Luc Besson's big-budget space opera Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets stars Dane DeHaan as Valerian and Cara Delevingne as Laureline, two officers from ...
Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets Review
DeHaan, a damn fine actor who's best employed as the wan, moody outsider, is desperately miscast as the supposedly suave, jet-booted hero. Delevingne is given little more to do than pout, glower ...
Review: 'Valerian' Is a Rave in Space (but Not Much Fun)
Valerian. Directed by Luc Besson. Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Sci-Fi. PG-13. 2h 17m. By A.O. Scott. July 20, 2017. Much as I hesitate to predict the future in such crazy times, I feel I can say ...
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (French: Valérian et la Cité des mille planètes) is a 2017 space opera film [10] written and directed by Luc Besson, and produced by his wife, Virginie Besson-Silla.It is based on the French science fiction comics series Valérian and Laureline, written by Pierre Christin, illustrated by Jean-Claude Mézières, and published by Dargaud.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Movie Review
Expensive and impressively, colorfully designed, this sci-fi/action movie is frequently silly and not always very smart, but it has a joyous exuberance and a sheer, dizzy love of the genre. Written and directed by Luc Besson and based on French comics by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets ...
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
Movie Review. Some jobs are easier than others. Just ask Major Valerian, an agent of Earth's World State Federation in the 28th century: ... Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (based on a French sci-fi comic Besson adored as a child) feels like that film to the tenth power. Or on steroids.
The First Valerian Reviews Are Here
The first reviews for Luc Besson's Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets heap praise upon the movie's CGI and spectacle, if not so much its human protagonists. Valerian itself is an adaptation of the French sci-fi comic book series Valérian and Laureline (which turns 50 this year) and follows the misadventures of space/time-traversing crime fighters Valerian and Laureline, as played ...
'Valerian' Delivers an Extraterrestrial Spectacle (Review)
A heaping dose of extraterrestrial eye candy invades movie theaters across the U.S. today (July 21). " Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets " is a new science-fiction action film based on ...
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets review: "A ...
Enter Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne), space agents who police the universe by day and flirt awkwardly by night. ... GAME REVIEWS MOVIE REVIEWS TV REVIEWS. 1. Concord review ...
The 12 Meanest Things Critics Are Saying About Valerian
Despite holding the rank of major, Valerian looks like an overgrown kid, overcompensating via an unconvincingly gruff faux Keanu Reeves accent (with the questionable dye job to match). " — CNN 9.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

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Reviewed at Regal L.A. Live, July 7, 2017. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 137 MIN.

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