Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets - E...

Before diving into the plot, one must understand the DNA of the film. Valérian and Laureline (originally Valérian: Spatio-Temporal Agent) was created by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières in 1967. For fifty years, this comic series influenced nearly every major sci-fi property that followed. George Lucas has openly admitted that the design of Star Wars—from Princess Leia’s slave outfit to the crowded cantina on Tatooine—borrowed heavily from Mézières' art.

Luc Besson, a lifelong fan, spent nearly a decade trying to bring this universe to the screen. The result is a film that doesn't just adapt a single comic issue but uses the central concept of Alpha—a massive space station that grew over centuries into a "city of a thousand planets"—as a narrative sandbox.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets opened in July 2017, directly against Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. It earned only $225 million worldwide against a $180 million budget (plus marketing), making it a significant box office bomb. American audiences rejected it, but it performed well in China ($60 million) and France (Besson’s home country). Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets - E...

Why did it fail?

However, on streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets has found a second life. Sci-fi fans looking for something that isn’t Star Wars or Star Trek have discovered its unique charm. It is a film that rewards repeat viewings—not for the story, but for the background details. Every frame is packed with aliens, signage, and tech that you missed the first time. Before diving into the plot, one must understand

The title is slightly misleading yet perfectly poetic. The "City of a Thousand Planets" is not a static metropolis but a living, growing space station known as Alpha. Originally a 21st-century international space station, Alpha expands over centuries as alien races are invited—or find their way—aboard. By the 28th century, Alpha is a massive, unwieldy conglomeration of billions of beings from thousands of species, all living in biodomes representing their distinct environments.

Besson’s genius in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is how he introduces Alpha. The opening sequence, set to David Bowie’s Space Oddity, shows the station growing from a small module to a massive organism through a montage of diplomatic handshakes and dockings. There are no words of exposition; it is pure visual storytelling. We see a pearl-diving alien race (the Pearls of Mul) visit humanity, and we watch as the station accretes species like a coral reef. By the time the title card appears, the audience understands exactly what Alpha is: a fragile miracle of multicultural coexistence on the brink of collapse. However, on streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon

The design of the Pearls—tall, graceful, amphibian-like beings—is a marvel of makeup and CGI. Their homeworld, Mul, is rendered with bioluminescent flora and peaceful waters, creating a stark contrast to the industrial underbelly of Alpha.

Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) walks a razor’s edge between cinematic excess and imaginative bravura. It’s a film that refuses modesty — a cartoon of cosmic ambition, drenched in saturated color, kinetic editing, and relentless invention. For anyone who loves science fiction as a genre of wonder rather than merely ideology, Valerian is an essential, if imperfect, modern fable: an argument that cinema can still astonish when it chooses imagination over convenience.

In 2017, visionary French director Luc Besson (known for The Fifth Element and Lucy) delivered what might be the most expensive independent film ever made: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Based on the seminal French comic series Valérian and Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, the film is less a conventional blockbuster and more a $200 million love letter to the sci-fi medium itself.

The city is the true protagonist. Divided into distinct biospheres (from a medieval kingdom to a water world to a techno-futuristic hub), Alpha feels alive. Besson fills every frame with thousands of visible details, alien languages on neon signs, and creatures designed by the late Mézières himself.