Luc Besson’s $180 Million ‘Valerian’ Is Dazzling, Fatally Flawed
Alpha’s Big Market, the largest commerce center in the universe—and Luc Besson’s imagination—exists in an alternate dimension in the film.
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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. 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 21 after seven years of writing, 100 days of shooting, and 20 months in postproduction at some of the world’s top special effects houses, Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic and WETA Digital, best known for work on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.