Luc Besson’s Valerian gets a jaw-dropping new trailer

The second trailer for Luc Besson's adaptation of cult 60s comic Valerian and Laureline arrived online today, and the sci-fi extravaganza, titled Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, looks absolutely gorgeous.

Video by The Skinny | 10 Nov 2016

Swimming in lush, saturated colours, the trailer shows the film's heroes, a pair of time-travelling government agents played by Cara Delevingne and Dane DeHaan, in a chase through an alien desert, calling in to the jaw-dropping City of a Thousand Planets, and visiting other eye-popping worlds filled with detail and colour. We also see other cast members like Clive Owen and Rihanna pop up.

Speaking at CinemaCon yesterday, director Luc Besson said that “I never thought that I could make a film with Valérian when I was young. It’s part of my childhood, but I never thought about it until I was like 30 years old.

"In fact, the guy who drew Valérian – his name is Jean-Claude Mézières – he was working on The Fifth Element, and he’s the one who said, ‘Why are you doing The Fifth Element? Why don’t you do Valerian? And then I started to think – I said, ‘Oh yeah, I never thought about it.’ Because at the time, it was just impossible to do, because there’s like two characters and 1,000 aliens. We couldn’t do it – the technique was not there yet – so we just had to be patient.”

And his patience looks to have paid off. Take a look at the gorgeous new trailer in the player below, and the original teaser trailer in the player above.

Our original story, and the film's first teaser trailer, from November 2016

The first trailer for Luc Besson's daft-looking Cara Delevingne vehicle Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets has just landed, and it's exactly what our post-US election brains need. 

Model Cara Delevingne and Place Beyond the Pines actor Dane DeHaan star as time-travelling government agents trying to prevent the genocide of a galactic empire. The trailer is brash, kinetic, colourful, fun and doesn't make much sense – so very much like a Luc Besson movie – and it's just the tonic we need to forget for one minute and 56 seconds that we live in a world where Donald Trump is president-elect.

The cast includes Clive Owen, Ethan Hawke and Rihanna, whose performance Besson has been raving about: “Rihanna blows me away," the Lucy and Fifth Element director wrote on Twitter. "She is a natural born actress."

The film looks to have a distinct Jupiter Ascending flavour, and we mean this as a compliment. One thing we can expect from a director as idiosyncratic as Besson is that it'll be different than the current cycle of blockbusters we get from Marvel. "The big difference between this and the Marvel pattern is that with Marvel you know after five minutes who’s the villain," Besson told Entertainment Weekly during production. "They do films that are super well made, but this pattern bothered me a little bit. What’s new here is we have two agents, and over the course of one film it’s a police investigation. So you don’t know who’s exactly bad until the end, because it’s an investigation. That’s why I can’t talk too much. But it’s a real story. That’s what I love about it."

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is released 21 Jul 2017. Let us know what you think of the promo in the comments below.