Yeah, I’m looking forward to it too. I’d never heard of it before today when I saw the trailer, but it looks amazing. Fifth Element is one of my favoritest films so I have little doubt this is going to be pretty phenomenal.
I think I’ll try and track down a copy of some of the comic books, to tide me over til next year.
Hard to tell from the trailer. It could be good or it could be another Jupiter Ascending. I’m suspicious that the trailer seemed a lot more focused on the special effects than the story or the characters.
Most of the comics are available on Amazon, although it looks like they are currently out of some of them. I expect that the movie will spur reprints, tho.
Aye; a lot of my excitement is baed on Besson’s track record. I haven’t seen Lucy yet tho and I know it got a lot of mixed reviews, but Leon: The Professional and The Fifth Element are high on my list of “Best Movies of the Last 30 Years” list. And even his movies that are just good (The Family, Arthur and the Invisibles, The Lady, Le Femme Nikita) are enjoyable, so I’m hopeful.
There’s also a brief interview with Cara Delevingne (in costume and apparently on-set) and she specifically declines to answer quite a few questions about the plot or the characters (in a very playful way, tho). IIRC she says Besson doesn’t want too many details getting out. An example is she’s asked about Rhianna and while she will talk about how great Rhianna is, she doesn’t say a word about Rhianna’s character or even how much they interact. Dane DeHaan does the same thing when he’s asked (again, while in costume).
As I understand things, Besson got the laws of France re-written so he could shoot this film in France and take advantage of tax breaks offered to film productions. The old laws would have precluded him filming in France, costing the economy 1200 +/- jobs worth well over US$150,000,000, solely because the film is in English. Politicians saw the wisdom of suddenly not caring about languages and rewrote the laws.
From what I’ve read, this is the largest budget film ever made in France, with a budget of about US$197M.
City of a thousand planets? How does that work? Are you sure you counted right?
Anyway, this looks interesting in a Fifth Element sort of way – in fact, it looks very, very similar. Same canyon like streets with floating cars, vaguely saurian blobby alien bad guys and, I dunno, rococo(?) design aesthetic. Bit of a clash between the CGI scenes and the scenes (like the beach) where it was probably uncluttered real world.
"Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne) are special operatives for the government of the human territories charged with maintaining order throughout the universe. Valerian has more in mind than a professional relationship with his partner – blatantly chasing after her with propositions of romance. But his extensive history with women, and her traditional values, drive Laureline to continuously rebuff him. "
One reason that it looks a lot like the old of TFE is that Besson based a lot of that on the Valerian and Laureling books. He’s been a big fan since he was a kid.
What you quoted makes the film sound as tho it’s a romance movie. It’s not. It’s a buddy cop movie. There is a plot; the romance seems to be subtext.
If by cliched you mean “theres something going on that they have to investigate and put a stop to, and there will be romantic subtext”, well, how is that different than Guardians of the Galaxy or Lethal Weapon 3 or 48 Hours or The Fifth Element and why do you think its something so easily dismissed? Did you not enjoy any of those other movies?
No, they are NOT “buddy cops”: Jack Cates didnt try to kiss Reggie Hammond, Tango didnt have a “thing” for Cash, there is little romantic plot between the stars of Rush Hour, etc.
But it remains to be seen. So far, every film like this where they spent a gazillion on scenery and SFX has been very “plot light”-* Avatar, Jupiter Ascending*, etc.
We’ll see how strict the movie sticks to the comics. In the comics Laureline is from midieval earth, Valerian is a “temporal spatial agent” (aka time traveler) that recruits her on one of his missions.
The city of a thousand planets is a gigantic space station where alien races from all over attach their own sections to support their atmospheric requirements.
The comics are very good, I recommend them. Cool to read them and see stuff I recognize from sci-fi movies that came out decades after the comics were made.
