Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Review. A celestial montage unfurls in the opening sequence of Luc Besson’s new science fiction opus, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. As David Bowie’s Space Oddity plays, an orbiting station grows larger and more unwieldy, with ships docking and adding incongruous wings to a sprawling satellite settlement.

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. Rihanna posted a publicity video about her role in Luc Besson's Valerian and the City of 1000 planets. 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. Director Luc Besson and actor Dane DeHaan, of the movie "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets," photographed in the L.A. Times Hero Complex photo studio at.

Eventually, the station swells to such Brobdingnagian proportions that it threatens to come crashing down and destroy the very thing that begat it, Earth. You don’t need special glasses to see this as a metaphor for the French filmmaker’s long- gestating spectacular, which opens on July 2. Free Download Of Harmonium (2017) on this page. Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic and WETA Digital, best known for work on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.

Dane De. Haan as the titular Valerian. Photographer: Lou Faulon; Photo courtesy of STX Entertainment Motion Picture Artwork . All Rights Reserved. With a budget of $1. French subsidies—Valerian isn’t only the costliest project in Besson’s three- decade- long directorial career, it’s also the most expensive movie produced in Europe and the most expensive independent feature film made anywhere. Although Besson has used equity financing and foreign sales to minimize the financial exposure for Europa. Corp, his production company, which funded most of the project, he’s still wagering its reputation and his own to test the heady notion that a Hollywood blockbuster can be an import, not export, product.

The odds of success would seem to be as long as those of the director’s young protagonists in their improbable quest to save the universe. The film, which Besson rewrote top to bottom after seeing James Cameron’s Avatar in 2. Cult Classics Movies 3 Idiotas (2017). D. And both of its stars are unproven: Dane De. Haan, who plays Valerian, has done mostly dark, brooding roles, and his most recent effort, A Cure for Wellness, bombed; Cara Delevingne, as his partner, Laureline, is a model whose biggest role before this was as the Enchantress in Suicide Squad, last summer’s epic bust.

Model- turned- actor Cara Delevingne as Laureline. Source: STX Films and Europacorp.

That trailer really got me. Watch the Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets - Final Trailer (2017). In the 28th century, Government of Human Territories operatives Valerian (Dane DeHaan.

But the director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional, and Lucy and the writer- producer of The Transporter and Taken movie franchises has been obsessed with Val. Besson has gone deep into space before: Valerian arrives exactly two decades after his influential sci- fi opera The Fifth Element.

Spurred by the world- building he saw in Avatar, Besson shot the whole thing in 3. D, with 8. 0 VFX artists, and created more than 2,7. Although De. Haan and Delevingne exude youth and the breezy nonchalance that comes with it, they are questionable choices at best for a film of this scale. Jazz great Herbie Hancock shows up as the duo’s no- nonsense military leader. By the time Rihanna appears as a mighty- morphing pole dancer named Bubble, it starts to feel like a desperate bid for social media relevance. The Hollywood studio system exists to weed out, or at least curb, this sort of directorial excess, which is why astronomically priced passion projects are rare and truly creative commercial films are rarer still.

Valerian is both—an outlier in a season of superhero spinoffs, reboots, and ripoffs. Rihanna as the shape- shifting chanteuse Bubble. Photographer: Daniel Smith.

All Rights Reserved. Yet it’s a fatally flawed film. What trips it up more than questionable casting or even stunted dialogue is the epically confused narrative. The screenplay careens through space and runs into an asteroid field of heavy- handed themes: galactic multilateralism and multiculturalism vs. The movie eventually overcame its initially poor showing at the box office to earn $2.

It’s possible Valerian will have a similar slow- burn effect. Certainly, its visual effects will warrant repeat viewings, and maybe Delevingne can fill the charismatic role that Milla Jovovich, another unproven actress at the time, did 2.

It’s hard to root against a film that cynical Hollywood studio heads are so eager to see fail, but let’s hope for Besson’s sake that Valerian goes quietly. He’s hinted at an urge to mine the surplus of source material to create a franchise. He’d be better served doing what the preservation- minded people of Earth do with the space city that was mushrooming out of control: Shoot it off into deep space and let it go.(Corrects sentence on the film’s distribution in 4th graf).