'Valerian And The City Of The Thousand Planets' Looks To Be Following In 'The Fifth Element''s Footsteps In New Images

Director Luc Besson’s follow-up to Lucy is a new sci-fi film based on the 1960s French comic Valérian and Laureline, the adventures of spatio-temporal agents across time and space. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is already shaping up to be Besson’s biggest project in years, with 2,400 FX shots compared to The Fifth Element’s 200.

In an exclusive for Entertainment Weekly, Besson gave some preliminary details for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. While he’s not willing to delve into the plot of his sci-fi epic just yet, some images from the movie give us a great idea of the adventurous tone in store.

Here’s Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne) with Besson (who has the original characters on his jacket).

Images from the set show futuristic outfits along with some outlandish beachwear, suggesting the same clash of garish colors and tone that made The Fifth Element such a treat.

For comparison, here are the original characters:

While he wouldn’t discuss the plot, Besson did talk at length about the tone he’s working toward.

“I centered the story to make it more real, more human. If you don’t like sci-fi, I want you to still like Valerian. And the other part was: Let’s try to do everything, before someone tells me it’s impossible. Let’s have the imagination go to the limit. And let’s be so super complicated, with aliens and robots and all this, but to make it look easy like a dance. You watch the thing, and it’s fluid and funny and wild. It’s not deep and complicated. It’s ultra sophisticated to do, but it looks easy. Like a cocktail where you don’t even taste the alcohol,” Besson said to EW.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand comes out in July 2017.