The story follows Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne), agents of the United Human Federation. They are tasked with maintaining order throughout the universe. The film opens with a stunning, wordless montage showing the International Space Station gradually welcoming alien species, expanding over generations into the metropolis of Alpha.
The main plot kicks off when Valerian has a vision of a lost paradise planet, Mul, destroyed by a mysterious weapon. He discovers that a surviving race of peaceful humanoids, the Pearls, are hiding in the lower depths of Alpha, being hunted by a ruthless Commander (Clive Owen) who is covering up a past atrocity.
What follows is a chain of heists, chases, and dimension-hopping adventures, including a trip to the interdimensional market of "Big Market," a sequence that has already been hailed as one of the most inventive chase scenes in sci-fi history.
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 - E...
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.
Luc Besson’s 2017 film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets adapts the long-running French comic series Valérian and Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières into a visually lavish, if narratively uneven, space opera. The film attempts an ambitious synthesis of pulp science-fiction spectacle, pop-cultural pastiche, and a romantic buddy-adventure, while foregrounding questions of colonial exploitation, ecological stewardship, and the limits of cinematic world-building.
Narrative and Themes At its core, Valerian follows two special operatives—Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne)—who travel to Alpha, a gargantuan orbital metropolis formed by the amalgamation of thousands of alien species and cultures. Their mission is to investigate threats to Alpha’s stability and to locate a missing, sentient species tied to the planet’s deeper secret. The plot functions largely as an episodic detective-adventure, moving from one dazzling set piece to another, and culminating in the revelation of a traumatized, exploited race whose rescue reorients the protagonists’ moral commitments. The story follows Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and
Thematically, Besson’s film gestures toward anti-colonial critique. The City of a Thousand Planets—Alpha—is literally constructed from the remnants of conquered worlds, a cosmopolitan utopia built on histories of extraction and displacement. The discovery that a seemingly innocuous trade in rare organisms masks a systemic pattern of captivity and commodification reframes the story as one about recognition and restitution. Valerian and Laureline’s personal arc—moving from complacent agents of a bureaucratic empire to sympathetic rescuers—mirrors an ethical awakening that the film asks its audience to share.
Visual Design and World-Building Where Valerian most fully succeeds is in visual imagination. Besson and his production team create a maximalist mise-en-scène: kaleidoscopic cityscapes, fluid creature design, and painstakingly detailed environments that reward sustained looking. The film’s aesthetics draw on Mézières’s original art while filtering it through contemporary CGI capabilities. Set pieces—such as the shifting marketplaces of Alpha, the luxury of Bubble Town, and the densely populated streets—function as both sensory overload and evidence of serious world-building effort.
However, the emphasis on spectacle also exposes the film’s structural weaknesses. Frequent detours into visual novelty sometimes come at the expense of narrative economy; characters and subplots are introduced with visual flair but underdeveloped in terms of motivation or consequence. This imbalance produces a film that is often thrilling to watch but occasionally thin to think about.
Characterization and Performance Valerian and Laureline are written as a classic odd-couple pairing: Valerian is impulsive and romantically fixated, Laureline is pragmatic and morally grounded. DeHaan’s performance leans into Valerian’s vanity and insecurity, while Delevingne brings a laconic cool to Laureline. Their chemistry has moments of genuine spark, but the screenplay’s heavy reliance on quips and action beats constrains deeper emotional engagement. Secondary characters—comic-relief sidekicks, bureaucratic villains, and tragic natives—are vividly designed but frequently feel like set dressing rather than fully realized agents within the story. The main plot kicks off when Valerian has
Cultural Impact and Reception Commercially and critically, Valerian divided audiences. Praised by some for its inventiveness and criticized by others for a perceived lack of narrative focus, the film has since been read as both a valiant modern riff on classic sci-fi comics and an example of spectacle exceeding story. Its ambitious attempt to bring European bande dessinée aesthetics to a Hollywood blockbuster register marks it as an interesting cross-cultural experiment, even if it does not always cohere dramatically.
Ethical and Political Readings Beyond surface spectacle, Valerian invites ethical readings tied to environmentalism and reparative justice. The revelation of an exploited species whose suffering powers the city’s exotic commodities functions as a metaphor for industries—both historical and contemporary—that profit from the labor and bodies of the marginalized. The film’s resolution, which centers rescue and restitution rather than conquest, privileges a moral corrective uncommon in action-oriented blockbusters.
Limitations and Critiques Key criticisms are structural: an overreliance on visual set pieces, underdeveloped supporting characters, and a screenplay that inconsistently balances humor, romance, and political stakes. Additionally, some viewers and critics questioned the film’s tonality—its playful pastiche sometimes undercutting the seriousness of its ethical concerns. Casting choices and character portrayals also prompted discussion about representation and whether the film’s cosmopolitan vision sufficiently interrogates the power relations it depicts.
Conclusion Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a film of striking contradictions: audacious visual imagination paired with episodic narrative looseness; genuine moral ambitions attenuated by blockbuster conventions. Its greatest achievement is its world-building—the sense that the screen contains a living, multifaceted universe. Even where it falters as a tightly constructed story, it remains a noteworthy attempt to translate comic-book wonder into cinematic spectacle and to ask how a society built from others’ fragments might reckon with its past. For viewers interested in visual invention, planetary-scale set design, and speculative explorations of exploitation and redemption, Valerian offers plenty to admire and debate.