A thousand planets is a lot to keep track of, and director Luc Besson—adapting the comic-book series Valerian and Laureline—isn’t much help in doing so. Set largely on an intergalactic space station where alien species of all sorts congregate, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a pinball machine of a movie that flings us from one sci-fi scenario to the next, caring little for continuity or context. The main characters are Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne), government agents of some sort trying to unravel a conspiracy of another sort. All of that is merely a narrative clothesline on which to hang a series of CGI creatures and fantastic locales, akin to Besson’s own The Fifth Element. Some of the details are wonderful—the cotton candy-colored clouds of one planet, the smoky incursion of crashing spaceships on the blissful blue seas of another. Yet none of it means much in relation to anything else. I suppose DeHaan and Delevingne are supposed to provide some sort of emotional center, but they mostly come across as two kids riffing on Star Wars scenes between Han and Leia. You can have your thousand planets; I’ll take one motley cantina on Tatooine.
