For those who’ve seen The Fifth Element, you know director Luc Besson is adept at creating at once breathtaking and wholly goofy visions of futuristic societies, going wild filming alien creatures who looked like this:
and humans who looked just as absurd:
The just-released trailer for his next film, Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets, similarly based on a graphic novel (Valerian and Laureline, by Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mézières) also looks inventive and fun in its vivid, dizzyingly detailed and totally absurd looking take on alien life. (Most of the aliens in the trailer are either reptilian or are somewhat anthropomorphic yet, simply, a little flabbier and gooier than humans.) The Fifth Element was set in the 23rd century, and this film is set (obviously in a different fictional universe) five centuries after that… so you can just imagine how much room for invention there was.
The trailer features Cara Delevingne and Dane DeHaan as the title characters of the graphic novel (DeHaan is Valerian, Delevingne is Laureline); it also happens to feature Rihanna, though all that’s revealed is that her character is very graceful at removing hats.
The film, which Besson both wrote and directed, also stars Clive Owen and Ethan Hawke.
And then there are all of the many bright, endless alien city panoramas, all set in the trailer to The Beatles’ “Because” (giving it an all the more hallucinatory quality) — and according to Variety, this is the first time the remaining members of the group have granted rights to use that song. In an IMDB Facebook Live Feed Q&A, Besson spoke of how seeing Avatar made him rewrite his own first draft, feeling that his own film “was not big enough, it was not good enough.” So, I guess it’s fair to say this will at least certainly be big.
Here’s the official description of the film, via Indiewire:
Valerian and Laureline embark on a mission to the breathtaking intergalactic city of Alpha, an ever-expanding metropolis comprised of thousands of different species from all four corners of the universe. Alpha’s seventeen million inhabitants have converged over time- uniting their talents, technology and resources for the betterment of all. Unfortunately, not everyone on Alpha shares in these same objectives; in fact, unseen forces are at work, placing our race in great danger.
Here’s the trailer: