Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets | July 21, 2017 | FLOP OF THE YEAR

[shayhiri]

Ooh, the Shay is so pumped right now!! Do it, Luc!! The Force is with you!! You can make or break it with this movie - and all will be forgiven!

[Arlborn]

3 hours ago, Ethan Hunt said:

 

 

This video hyped me so much.

[Ethan Hunt]

6 minutes ago, Arlborn said:

This video hyped me so much.

Yeah it definitely raised my interest.

[junkshop36]

If it's anything like The Fifth Element but taken to the next level I love this movie. 

[shayhiri]

180m budget says HI! Groundbreaking level of visual inventiveness - that's all I care about.

[kowhite]

On August 19, 2015 at 8:55 PM, babz06 said:

It seems totally irresponsible to spend so much money on a property like this. The leads are not even stars, i dont get it.

 

Luc, please keep producing Liam Neeson action movies and other 40m dollar action flicks that do well.

 

We have to finance what?  Ok, fine.  Fine.  Fine, well do it.  

 

Yeah, something like that.  

 

I I just hope this scratches my 5th Element itch.  Multi Pass!

 

 

[The Futurist]

The visual style of the Fifth Element was grealty influenced by the guy who did the Valerian comics, he even worked on the movie.

 

He influenced George Lucas' designs grealty for Star Wars.

 

'77 Star Wars.

 

His name is Jean Claude Mézières.

 

 

[The Stingray]

The Fifth Element was also influenced by a comic Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius did called The Incal. I believe there was also a lawsuit involved.

[Klingo]

http://io9.gizmodo.com/luc-bessons-scifi-epic-valerian-looks-like-the-fifth-el-1784066279

 

The prospect of a new, big scale scifi movie from The Fifth Element director Luc Besson is exciting enough. After seeing footage and images from Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con this Thursday, it seems that excitement is fully warranted.

Valerian doesn’t open until July 21, 2017, but Besson was on hand with stars Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne to show a few quick scenes from the film, and explain the world the director has dreamed of making a reality for decades.

Besson fell in love with the original comic books, Valérian and Laureline, as a child. Later in life, he met the original artist, Jean-Claude Mézières and the two collaborated on The Fifth Element. Mezieres begged Besson to adapt Valerian, but the director didn’t think it was possible. With a cast made up of 10 percent humans and 90 percent aliens, and set on a super futuristic world called Alpha, technology wasn’t ready for Valerian in 1999.

 

Besson felt technology was ready around 2008... but then he saw James Cameron’s Avatar, and realized he wasn’t ready anymore. In awe of the kind of world-building he wanted to accomplish himself, he threw out the script he’d written and started again. The result is the film he finished shooting five weeks ago, but still has 10 months of post-production on.

Because most of the over 2,700 visual effects shots in Valerian aren’t done yet (to compare, Fifth Element only had 200), the scenes shown were mostly just practical sets and dialogue. But they were funny, light, and very Luc Besson—lots of quippy jokes in a hyper-realized environment. One scene showed Laureline beating up two guards and leaving them tied in knots. Another had the pair flying their ship, which is shaped like an asterix, down to a sandy planet on a mission where they have to dress like local tourists. A third scene was set to “Staying Alive” by Wyclef Jean as Valerian is lured into a club run by a character played by Ethan Hawke, containing an exotic dancer played by Rihanna.

The fourth scene was an action set-piece that felt a little like Mad Max. On a desert planet, Valerian and Laureline are running from a massive creature and several humans pick them up in a bus to help them escape. To cover them, one of those humans uses a VR-like helmet to fire up a Gatling gun drone. The alien dodges the fire and jumps onto the bus, resulting in a huge gun battle, until Valerian summons his ship and he and Laureline jump onto it in slow motion, just out of the alien’s reach.

All the scenes were cool and fun, but the best was yet to come. Describing it doesn’t really do it justice, but here goes: Valerian is on a mysterious ship, she’s talking in his ear, while Laureline tells him where to go. One of her directions runs directly into a wall. “You said the quickest way,” she replies. So Valerian smashes through it and into a completely new environment on the ship.In a single long take, he smashes through another wall, and another wall, and another wall, and in-between each wall is an entirely new scene—something industrial, something agricultural, a bottomless pit, etc. The shot is absolutely amazing.

Besides the footage, there was a bit of information on the world of Valerian as well. The opening credits cover several centuries of history starting with actual footage of a U.S. space mission linking up with a Russian space station in 1975. From there, more countries join, until the entire world has a section up there. But then an alien race joins, and then more, and by the year 2300 this mass of humanity, called Alpha, has become too big to be so close to Earth, so it has to go out into the cosmos. The film takes place 400 years later... but it also takes place in a single day.

There are over 200 alien species in the film, some made by motion-capture, others with practical effects.

 

Valerian opens in exactly one year, and if it lives up to the footage and scope of imagination shown in Hall H Thursday, we’re in for something special.

[Klingo]

http://www.wired.com/2016/07/comic-con-valerian-panel/

 

Luc Besson’s Valerian Is Exactly What Hollywood Needs Right Now

The math of Valerian is perfect. It’s basically the director of The Fifth Element, plus a French sci-fi comic series credited with inspiring Star Wars, plus soon-to-be-Enchantress Cara Delevingne, plus perennially-wonderfully-weird actor Dane DeHaan, plus a massive world filled with aliens and cameos. What’s the grand total? The kind of intergalactic adventure movie sci-fi fans dream about.

Yet there are times—especially with sci-fi movies—when the parts are good, but the sum is terrible. Judging by the reaction it just got during its Hall H panel at Comic-Con International, Valerian is not that. Director Luc Besson, along with his producer/wife Virginie Besson-Silla, presented a series of concept drawings and scenes from the film, based on the comics series Valérian and Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, and it looks glorious. Filmed over six months in Paris, the movie, in which Valerian (DeHaan) and Laureline (Delevingne) embark on a mission to the intergalactic city of Alpha, is easily the most ambitious project Besson has ever tackled—and there are sill more than 2,700 visual effects shots to finish.

But there’s no way it could’ve ever been small. Besson has been wanting to make Valerian pretty much since he was ten years old and, as he told Hall H, he “fell in love with Laureline … but wanted to be Valerian.” Valerian, according to DeHaan and the footage of him in action that Besson showed, is a “space bro”—a not-fully-swaggering-yet Han Solo who depends (and crushes) on Laureline. The heroine, because this is a Besson film, is much more capable. (In one scene shared during the panel, Laureline took on two guards with the kind of ass-kicking traditionally reserved for your Lucy Lawlesses and such.)

“It’s a long, extremely impressive list of female characters,” Delevingne said when asked about Besson’s predilection for female characters like those in Lucy and The Professional, “and Laureline is that.”

Another of Besson’s famous female characters is The Fifth Element’s Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), who also got a couple shout-outs during the Hall H panel. By the time Valerian comes out next July, it will have been 20 years since that movie came out. And in that amount of time, visual effects have gotten better (there were some 200 shots in that movie, compared to the thousands in Valerian), the Valérian and Laureline-inspired Avatar has come and gone, and Hollywood has finally caught up with the kind of female-centric worlds Besson specializes in.

“Twenty years ago ago, I was weird,” Besson said. “Twenty years later, the world got as weird as me.”

[Klingo]

https://nothingbutcomics.net/2015/12/14/valerian/

 

Was STAR WARS influenced by a French science fiction comic?

 

A variety of sources – Flash Gordon movie serials, the films of Akira Kurosawa, and mythological hero narratives, among others – influenced the creation of the Star Wars franchise.  But some argue that an uncredited influence on Star Wars is the French science fiction comics series Valerian and Laureline. Created by writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières in 1967, Valerian and Laureline depicts designs and adventures that are similar to some elements in the Star Wars films.

 

Although the series is popular in Europe, Valerian and Laureline may be unfamiliar to many American comics readers. The series’ premise is that a benevolent Terran Galactic Empire based in the 28th Century protects all of time and space.  In the first adventure, Spatio-Temporal Agent Valerian journeys to medieval France to stop a time-travelling villain. While there, he is aided by a young native peasant woman, Laureline.  Valerian  returns to the 28th Century with Laureline, who is trained as a Spatio-Temporal Agent. The two agents are partnered together and encounter many alien cultures and dangers in the course of their adventures, all of which are lavishly illustrated by Mézières.

While the universe-spanning time travel adventure premise might suggest a closer connection to the Doctor Who television series than Star Wars, several designs and adventures in Valerian and Laureline are similar to some elements of the Star Wars movies.

[The Futurist]

I read recently lots of Valerian comics and yup, Lucas was a biiiiig fan.

 

Mézières is a fantastic artist.

 

 

[Shaldun]

11 hours ago, Arlborn said:

This video hyped me so much.

Btw, still no leak of this footage ? I'm hyped to see it now. Totally forgot about the movie since its announcement but I am a huge fan of The 5th Element so pretty pumped for that. I'm always down for any space movie and even more for an original one. I mean even with all its defects, I still liked Jupiter Ascending for that.

 

9 hours ago, kowhite said:

 

Luc, please keep producing Liam Neeson action movies and other 40m dollar action flicks that do well.

 

We have to finance what?  Ok, fine.  Fine.  Fine, well do it.  

 

Yeah, something like that.  

 

I I just hope this scratches my 5th Element itch.  Multi Pass!

 

 

Yeah if that's a way to be able to finance some stuff like Valerian, do Taken 15 if you want, Luc !

[Arlborn]

32 minutes ago, Shaldun said:

Btw, still no leak of this footage ? I'm hyped to see it now. Totally forgot about the movie since its announcement but I am a huge fan of The 5th Element so pretty pumped for that. I'm always down for any space movie and even more for an original one. I mean even with all its defects, I still liked Jupiter Ascending for that.

 

Yeah if that's a way to be able to finance some stuff like Valerian, do Taken 15 if you want, Luc !

I searched for a bit and couldn't find anything, I guess it just isn't big enough yet to have leaks. It's a shame but it's okay, there's still one year to go and we've finally got plenty of news about it now.

 

I'm pretty sure this movie is going to be a top5 most anticipated for me next year.

[WrathOfHan]

This really needs a new date and it could happen with all the VFX work needed. 

[AniNate]

Since "gigantic bomb" appears to be the default expectation here, I'm kinda hoping for a huge hit

[Shaldun]

 

10 minutes ago, WrathOfHan said:

This really needs a new date and it could happen with all the VFX work needed. 

There's still a full year so it's quite a lot of time for the VFX. Also they were already pretty cool in the footage shown from what I gather from the reports. It can fit  in this schedule. Though I do think it needs a new date because opening against Dunkirk will be too hard. I personally am more excited by Valerian but a Nolan war movie will be big and they shouldn't go agianst that much competition (though if they do, it's a big trust sign in their product). Dunkirk would particularly be big in Europe and especially France which is somewhere where Besson movies are genrally a big success so they might want to avoid being penalized there. There are quite a lot of other dates available for them in Summer 2017 that are better than this. Only one week later and they have Jumanji instead of Dunkirk as their main competitor and that's totally a different story and August is pretty empty apart from Alien Covenant. If they can, they might even go in June though that's quite full already.

[CoolioD1]

17 hours ago, babz06 said:

 

Kyle Buchanan ‏@kylebuchanan  15m15 minutes ago

If you've ever thought, "I wanna see Ethan Hawke doing Chris Tucker in THE FIFTH ELEMENT," this is likely as close as you'll get

18 retweets26 likes

 

 

ok my ticket's bought.

[ddddeeee]

I'm excited.

[marveldcfox]

I am really looking forward to this, moreso than other summer movies in 2017, but I am afraid that it won't get proper marketing and release. Really hoping one of the big studios strike a deal for distribution and marketing in North America, Latin America, some European and Asian markets. I guess the lack of a star in the movie is why no big North American studio is willing to distribute it. This movie needs to be successful if we want more inventive, visually unique and stunning sci-fi space epics not called star wars, star trek or related to a brand name, gotg (marvel). It's hard to make something not based on a well known IP/brand into an event. But really rooting for Luc Lesson and entire Valerian team.

Edited July 22, 2016 by marveldcfox