By Travis Johnson
It’s gonna look great – that’s one thing we can say for sure about Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, French director Luc Besson’s return to star-spanning science fiction. Whether the story will be any good is anyone’s guess, but hey – the script for The Fifth Element is absolute pants and people love that thing, so maybe a complete lack on narrative cohesion is no barrier to cult immortality. Hell, it may be a plus.
Based on the classic Franco-Belgian comics series by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mezieres, the film sees 28th century special operatives Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne) 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 knowledge, intelligence and cultures with each other. There is a mystery at the center of Alpha, a dark force which threatens the peaceful existence of the City of a Thousand Planets, and Valerian and Laureline must race to identify the marauding menace and safeguard not just Alpha, but the future of the universe.
Sounds pretty standard for this sort of thing, but what a feast for the eyes it is. One of the reasons The Fifth Element struck a chord was Besson’s good-natured pillaging of European SF comics for his visual cues – if the name Metal Hurlant rings any bells, you know what we’re talking about. Nobody else really picked up that particular baroque baton, although the Wachowski misfire Jupiter Ascending gave it a good shot. Now ol’ Luc is back to remind us all that there are production deign options that are not directly descended from Blade Runner and/or 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a lesson we have to keep re-learning, apparently.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets hits Australian cinemas on August 10, 2017.
