Critic Reviews

It's a film filled with humor, charm, excitement and so many memorable images that many viewers will find themselves struggling to keep from blinking so as not to miss any of the eye-popping delights crammed into each overstuffed frame.

Valerian is at times so mind-meltingly beautiful and strange that I’m still not sure I didn’t just dream it all.

Valerian is a film to wallow in, not follow, and if you’re tuned to its extra-terrestrial wavelength, you wouldn’t cut a second.

The difference between the film and its equally expensive contemporaries is Luc Besson's playful, childlike naïveté.

Are there rules on how to make a space epic? If there are, Luc Besson has certainly never heard them because in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, he takes the genre upside down, gives it a shake and rattle, and delivers one of the most positively bonkers films of the year.

A movie for science fiction fans who wish every minute of “Star Wars” was the cantina scene.

This is a movie that will make you scream – in confusion, in delight, in anger, in ecstasy. Sometimes all at once.

“Valerian” manages to be both cutting-edge and delightfully old-school — the kind of wild, endlessly creative thrill ride that only the director of “Lucy” and “The Fifth Element” could deliver, constructed as an episodic series of missions, scrapes and near-misses featuring a mind-blowing array of environments and stunning computer-generated alien characters.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets might well represent the apotheosis of Besson’s singularly loony brand of filmmaking. It’s bonkers and gorgeous and confusing and thrilling and tiring and overflowing with ideas.

As a mogul, Besson doesn’t worry about pleasing his corporate masters. He and his visual effects supervisor, Scott Stokdyk, can expend all their energy on topping themselves and making each other laugh. The movie is like a wave that makes you want to yell, “Cowabunga!”