Luc Besson is an erratic filmmaker. He punches out a feature pretty much annually, all while writing and producing a whole bunch of genre B‑movies during his downtime.
It seems that the surprise success of Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson as a backpacker who is transformed into a digi-god after an accident, has meant that Mr Besson has been allowed to go big, and the result is the bizarrely named Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, starring Dane Dehaan and Cara Delevingne. From this first preview, it looks very ’90s.
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So ’90s, in fact, that it uses Elliott Smith on the soundtrack, and looks like the director’s very own eccentric space opera, The Fifth Element, from 1997. Take a peek here, and the finished feature is set to drop onto screens on 21 July, 2017, at the height of summer where it looks to belong.
**Update – 29 March, 2017**
New trailer time! We said that we thought this looked a lot like Luc Besson had remade The Fifth Element, and this second trailer confirms those suspicions. Fingers crossed that this bubble gum sci-fi epic is as fun as looks in this extended preview.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is released 4 August.
