Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Trailer Looks Fantastic

Luc Besson‘s adaptation of Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières’ comic books Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets looks visually stunning. With a summer movie slate that will give you plenty of well known entities, from The Mummy and Transformers: The Last Knight to Spider-Man: Homecoming and War for the Planet of the Apes, Besson’s fever dream is a welcome jolt of the new.  

The director of The Professional and The Fifth Element has a very distinct, singular visual style, one glimpsed most recently in 2014's Lucy, a bit of a sci-fi and superhero mashup that saw Scarlett Johannson's titular character forced to smuggle a drug that, once it leaks inside her, turns her into what could only be described as a god. Besson brings his love of the extreme and his sensuous, busy visual style to bear on this rollicking sci-fi flick. This new trailer revels in his love for extremely colorful palettes, bizarre alien races and whiz-bang technology; Valerian looks to be pure, distilled Besson. The city of the film's title is Alpha,  a magnificent, sprawling alien world that has been built on the knowledge of a vast array of species from all over the galaxy, creating a utopia of collective intelligence. But now after centuries of peace, an unknown force is angling to destroy Alpha, and our two heroes, special operatives Valerian and Laureline, played by Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne respectively, have only ten hours to identify and eliminate the source of the unrest.

Joining DeHaan and Delevingne are Clive Owen, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Kris Wu, and Blade Runner's very own Rutger Hauer.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets will premiere on July 21.