Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets - E... May 2026
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.
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.
While the leads struggle, the supporting cast soars. Clive Owen delivers a delightfully slimy performance as Commander Arun Filitt, the human leader with a dark secret. Ethan Hawke steals his entire scene as Jolly the Pimp, a flamboyant, frog-like alien running a shape-shifting cabaret club (featuring a memorable cameo by Rihanna as Bubble, a polymorphic entertainer). Rihanna’s dance sequence, where she shifts through ten different forms in two minutes, is genuinely breathtaking—a silent film-era performance within a CGI blockbuster.
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.
In the landscape of modern science fiction cinema, few films arrive with as much visual ambition and narrative stumble as Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Yet, before the wooden dialogue and the miscast chemistry of its leads take center stage, the film offers a masterpiece of silent storytelling: the opening montage, set to David Bowie’s "Space Oddity." Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a
This sequence—sometimes referred to by fans as the "E" for "Evolution" or "Exploration"—is a dazzling, nearly wordless ten minutes that accomplishes what the rest of the film struggles to achieve: it makes you fall in love with an idea.
The Handshake in the Void The sequence begins in 1975, with an American astronaut and a Soviet cosmonaut meeting aboard a primitive space station. The Cold War is still tangible, yet the act of docking their capsules is a gesture of fragile hope. When an alien species—resembling luminous, ethereal seals—arrives and offers a glowing pearl of energy, the humans hesitate, then accept. This handshake is the seed from which the City of a Thousand Planets (Alpha) will grow.
Time-Lapse of Utopia What follows is a breathtaking time-lapse of architectural and cultural accumulation. We watch as modules from every nation, then every species, latch onto the original station. Besson uses no exposition; we simply see the station bulge, morph, and bloom like a coral reef in zero gravity. By 2040, it’s a sprawling metropolis. By 2150, it houses reptilian warriors, aquatic farmers, and cybernetic merchants. The sequence visually answers the question: How do you build a city for a thousand species? You let them arrive, one by one, and give them a dock. However, on streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon
Bowie’s Elegy David Bowie’s haunting, melancholic track is not an arbitrary choice. "Space Oddity" is a song about isolation ("Can you hear me, Major Tom?"), yet Besson repurposes it as an anthem of connection. As the station grows, Major Tom’s lonely fate contrasts with Alpha’s crowded harmony. It suggests that the tragedy of our early space age was isolation, and the triumph of the future is symbiosis.
The Tragedy of What Follows The brilliance of the "E" sequence is also its curse. It sets an emotional and conceptual bar that the actual plot—a generic rescue mission involving stolen converters and a rogue commander—cannot reach. The opening promises a documentary of a living ecosystem; the film delivers a buddy-cop actioner.
In the end, the opening of Valerian remains one of the most hopeful and beautifully executed montages in 21st-century sci-fi. It reminds us that Besson is a master of world-building, even when he forgets how to populate that world with characters we care about. The "E" stands for Evolution, but also for Elegy—a mourning for the great film that could have been, hiding inside the mediocre one we received.
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