My opinion : Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (French: Valérian et la Cité des mille planètes) is a 2017 English-language French 3D space opera film written and directed by Luc Besson, and co-produced by Besson and his wife, Virginie Besson-Silla. The film is based on the French science fiction comics series Valérian and Laureline, written by Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mézières. It stars Dane DeHaan as Valerian and Cara Delevingne as Laureline, with Clive Owen, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Kris Wu and Rutger Hauer in supporting roles. Besson independently crowd-sourced and personally funded Valerian. With a production budget of around $180 million, it is both the most expensive European and independent film ever made. As a frenchie myself, I can’t help but support french directors in their realization of movies such as Luc Besson’s Valerian. I’m going to start off with the positives and then slowly deteriorate to the flaws ; first off, the cgi is amazing. Its serein, incandescent, ethereal and out of this world realistic. You could almost imagine that the aliens and monsters that were in the film were actually real. Secondly, the first twenty minutes or so of the beginning of Valerian is perfect, from the ever so comedic and near genius like intro of the humans making contact with the aliens and how they built the city to the sad but fairly immersive scene of when an entire species is desolated and destroyed and we follow a young aliens escape along with the others to finally the scene where we both meet our hero and heroin as they have fun together. And last but not least, that Big Market scene was undoubtedly creatively satisfying, and a fresh new action packed idea that works very well in this colorful world. Now, despite the numerous qualities, Valerian sadly did remain a letdown to me. Because well, there are many bad things to point out about the characters, pace of film and etc.. aesthetically the movie is favorably fabulous, but to be fair I never really quite liked both Laureline and Valerian as our protagonists, I never really rooted for them as much . As I would like to, and the fact that they were underdeveloped and didn’t really have a backstory I could empathize with helped worsen that part. To add injury, the villain was terrible, he had no story, and was even blander and duller then the main protagonists. Finally the pace was so out of place which kind of bothered me. So to put it nicely, Valerian and the city of a thousand planets isn’t a great film or even a very good film, and it barely strides on good but does it remain fun and is a great film for cgi action packed lovers? Sure, I guess. 6.6/10