Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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French director-producer Luc Besson has given us some great adventure films (“Leon: The Professional,” “La Femme Nikita,” “The Transporter” series, the “Taken” series, “District 13,” “Lucy,” etc.) as well as some clunkers. We’ll forgive the clunkers.

Along the way, Besson churned out a wonky sci-fi cult classic called “The Fifth Element.” At the time of its 1997 release it was the most expensive European film ever made. Fortunately, it did fairly well at the box office.

To consult on that film, Besson tapped Jean-Claude Mézières, the artist who had created the sci-fi comic strip “Valérian and Laureline.”

A fan of Mézières, Besson asked him, “Why are you doing this &%$# film? Why you don’t do ‘Valerian’?” The answer, of course, was one of technology and money, due to the storyline’s “vast monster to human ratio.”

Now technology has caught up. So Luc Besson has just written, directed, and co-produced the most expensive French film ever made. “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” (French title: “Valérian et la Cité des mille planètes”) took a budget of $226-million to deliver its “Avatar” quality CGI effects.

“Technically, I could see that we can do everything now,” says Besson. “The film proved that imagination is the only limit.”

For those of you non-geeks who failed to follow the 1967 Franco-Belgian comic strip, this is the story of Valérian and his colleague Laureline, agents of the Spatio-Temporal Service assigned to protect the Terran Empire against paradoxes caused by rogue time-travelers.

In all, it took 21 graphic novels to collect the 43 years of comic strips by Mézières and his writer Pierre Christin. However, Luc Besson has managed to compress everything down to 2 hours and 17 minutes in “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.”

The English-language sci-fi adventure film is currently playing at Tropic Cinema.

Here, Alpha is a 28th-century city where species from all over the universe have converged, kind of like a cultural United Nations (but for planets). However, a dark force is threatening the city’s peaceful existence, so the Minister of Defense sends two of his best operatives to hunt down the malefactors through both time and space.

Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne) report to Commander Arün Filitt (Clive Owen) for this mission. During their investigation, they encounter a shapeshifting entertainer named Bubbles (the singer Rihanna), Jolly the Pimp (Ethan Hawke), Captain Neza (Kris Wu), Creature Jessica Rabbit (Sand Van Roy), and Bob the Pirate (Alain Chabat). Emperor Haban Limaï (voiced by Elizabeth Debicki), the President of the World State Federation (Rutger Hauer), and the Defense Minister (Herbie Hancock) guide things along from on high. And you can count on Igon Siruss (voiced by John Goodman), a Kodar’Khan pirate captain and the galaxy’s most-wanted criminal, to offer some wrongdoing.

“Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” moves along on sheer kinetic energy, a surreal mishmash of “Star Wars,” “The Fifth Element,” and “Barbarella” with big-budget special effects and a thrill-ride sensibility.

We agree with our friends at IndieWire who recommend seeing the film “in 3D on the biggest screen possible.” As movie theaters say, go big or go home.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com