"New ‘Valerian’ TV Spot Is Full of Weird Aliens" Topic

"A new TV spot has been released for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, giving us a new look at The Fifth Element director Luc Besson's gloriously weird sci-fi epic. The film is based on the comic book series of the same name and takes place in the 28th century, where a duo of special operatives—Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laurelines (Cara Delevingne)—are tasked with maintaining order throughout the human territories. They're given their toughest assignment yet: traveling to the city of Alpha and unmasking a menace that threatens the entire universe.

This is a fascinating movie for a number of reasons. It marks a return to super weird sci-fi for Besson after action-driven films like Lucy, but it also may appear as a "ripoff" of Guardians of the Galaxy to those who don't know the source material predates the Guardians comics by a couple years. Indeed the film no doubt was greenlit based on audience response to Guardians, but it'll be interesting to see if audiences at large are in for another weird-looking space epic just a few months after Guardians 2 hit theaters. It's certainly clear from this TV spot that Besson promises a lot of new, crazy creatures, so here's hoping the story is up to snuff…"
Main page with trailer
link

Amicalement
Armand

This part of the article sounds interesting too:

"Scripted by Besson, the film also stars Clive Owen, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, John Goodman, Herbie Hancock, and Kris Wu. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets opens in theaters on July 21st."

I'm definitely curious!

Dan

Sometimes I just don't get it. They spent time, effort, and money to get the details surprisingly faithful to the original comic book.

And when 99.99% of the job was done they had a massive coke party, drew lots out of a hat and probably had the longest brainstorming session dedicated to this film on the subject of "fow the huck do we find two actors that are NOTHING like the characters they portray ?"

Valerian is supposed to be this very ruggedly handsome guy, thirty-ish, possibly going onto forty, who is certainly brave and dedicated to being a hero, but he's also clumsy, not as smart as he thinks he is and quite a dunderhead, shooting aliens, no problem, appraise a situation, not so much.

Laureline is a hot red-head, who thinks everything through, wastes no time in subtleties and knows how to use her sex appeal without being cheap.

And somehow they decided that the leads would be Captain Babyface and a pair of eyebrows (ok, at least they come with their own girl …)

And then Besson said something that wants me to have his face, the sharp corner of a table and my foot in the same room. "I already did a movie with a redhead !"

Come on, somebody had a brain anyeurism and mistook it for a brilliant idea !!! It's the only way I can explain it.

I'm grateful I've never read the comics; I can view it as its own story/film with no clutter or contrast.

I never read the comics either. I'm going for the visual effects. It looks really good from that perspective.

Patrick,

I can understand where your frustration might be coming from. I get exactly like that every time a book is turned into a movie.

Now I'm afraid to look too deeply in into what the comics are all about, for fear of experiencing the same with this movie. :)

Dan
PS. "Valerian is supposed to be this very ruggedly handsome guy, thirty-ish, possibly going onto forty, who is certainly brave and dedicated to being a hero, but he's also clumsy, not as smart as he thinks he is and quite a dunderhead, shooting aliens, no problem, appraise a situation, not so much."
In that case Valerian sounds a bit like Captain Reynolds from the Firefly series.

I suppose they read the subtext of "young space-time agents" one time too many. That, and Besson has a history of casting wannabe actress models for whatever reason.

Would I have preferred Adrien Brody as Valerian? Sure, or pretty much anybody instead of a nobody but hey, it's not like every good graphic novel filmatisation had a lead who looked like the drawn character or vice versa.