Luc Besson Shares Valerian Images

It’s always exciting to see a big-budget original sci-fi idea take flight, even when its director is someone as hit-and-miss as Luc Besson, who has delivered some straight-up classics to the genre (The Fifth Element, among others) but also his fair share of duds (Lucy and Lockout, anyone? Anyone? I didn’t think so).

His latest, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, is well into shooting, and there are some major reasons to be excited about it, as is highlighted in a set of new photos on Besson’s Facebook. The cast, led by Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne, is tremendously stacked, and the aesthetic Besson is gunning for here seems to fall somewhere between Speed Racer and Ex Machina in a way that could be really fun if executed correctly.

Moreover, the plot, based on a series of comics, is at least ambitious. DeHaan and Delevingne play special operatives for the government of human-controlled territories charged with maintaining order throughout the universe, who are tasked with a secretive and dangerous mission. It all looks like a bit of a lark, and Besson excels at this kind of far-flung, gloriously insane adventure, so it should be interesting to see Valerian come together.