First Images From Luc Besson’s VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS Look Promising

Luc Besson is returning to the sci-fi well, and based on these first images from Entertainment Weekly, that might be something worth celebrating:

As you can see, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets stars Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne as people who alternate between wearing cool sci-fi battle gear and unfortunate casual attire. As you can’t see, the film also stars Clive Owen, John Goodman, Ethan Hawke, and Her Majesty, Rihanna.

The film, which is about halfway done filming right now, is based on a French comic called Valerian and Laureline about a couple humans who go all over the galaxy solving crimes. If you click through to the Entertainment Weekly article, it comes with a nice Besson interview about the project. It’s a great read, but I’m particularly fond of this bit in which Besson describes the inspiration he got after watching James Cameron make Avatar:

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 [laughs].

I’m not 100% sure I want to drink that cocktail, but I am eager to see what this film will end up being. If it’s another colorful cartoon like The Fifth Element, we could be in for something really fun.