Though it now has a new title that’s quite a mouthful, we’re still very intrigued by Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (seriously, who thought that would be better than just Valerian?). The director may have only made one sci-fi classic in his career with The Fifth Element, but across all of his films he shows off an imaginative, wacky enthusiasm that makes his work a lot of fun to watch, even if the final product doesn’t always turn out so well.
For his latest effort, the aforementioned Valerian, Besson has assembled Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne to help him adapt Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézieres‘ comic series. For those unfamiliar with it, the plot focused on the titular agent (DeHaan) and his sidekick Laureline (Delevingne) as they “solve crimes and embark on adventures all across the galaxy.”
Today, after receiving the first image earlier this week, we now have a new batch of still courtesy of Entertainment Weekly. They show off the film’s sets and costumes, which all look very Besson-y, and promise a fun, sci-fi adventure that certainly won’t lack any imagination.
Speaking about his desire to make the story more real and more human, Besson told EW the following:
I allowed myself much more freedom. I centered the story to make it more real, more human. If you don’t like sci-fi, I want you to still like Valerian. And the other part was: Let’s try to do everything, before someone tells me its impossible. Let’s have the imagination go to the limit. And let’s be so super complicated, with aliens and robots and all this, but to make it look easy like a dance. You watch the thing, and it’s fluid and funny and wild. It’s not deep and complicated. It’s ultra sophisticated to do, but it looks easy. Like a cocktail where you don’t even taste the alcohol.
When quizzed about who the villain will be, Besson said:
I can’t tell you that. The big difference between this and the Marvel pattern is that with Marvel you know after five minutes who’s the villain. They do films that are super well made, but this pattern bothered me a little bit. What’s new here is we have two agents, and over the course of one film, it’s a police investigation, in fact. So you don’t know who’s exactly bad until the end, because it’s an investigation. That’s why I can’t talk too much. But it’s a real story. That’s what I love about it.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is set to arrive in theaters on July 21, 2017 and also stars John Goodman, Clive Owen, Ethan Hawke and Rihanna.