Review: In ‘Valerian,’ cosmic splendor struggles for liftoff

WHEN even most of the good spectacles carry a strong whiff of prepackaging, try taking in the air of Luc Besson's sci-fi extravaganza "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets."

Its atmosphere — vibrant in color, elastic in form — takes some acclimating to after such a barrage of more sanitized summer movies. Watching "Valerian" is to simultaneously and acutely realize what's missing from so many other big films (visual inventiveness, freewheeling unpredictability) and appreciate what the more controlled studio project does so much better (precision pacing, half-decent writing).

Had "Valerian" — a lifelong passion project for the French filmmaker that's been called the most expensive indie film ever made — been produced in the studio system, it would have been better. But also worse.

"Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets," adapted by Besson from Pierre Christin and Jen Claude Mezieres' comic book series, is just your average Dane Dehaan movie with extraterrestrial ducks, a pole-dancing Rihanna and a prominent cameo from Herbie Hancock — on hand, presumably, to channel the cosmic spirit of his album covers.

This one slides in somewhere on the spectrum of rococo science fictions like the Wachowskis' "Jupiter Ascending" or James Gunn's more recent "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2." These are worlds populated by a lavish and somewhat harmonious diversity of life form. In the opening montage of "Valerian" (its best sequence), the commander of the sprawling space station Alpha welcomes over time a steady stream of every nationality of Earth and