"Valerian and the City Of A Thousand Planets" opening scene

Here's a scene roughly halfway into the film whose budget was the most expensive European film ever made up until this time. It is based on a French sci-fi comic book series. Click on the image for a larger view.

Here is a four minute video showing the opening sequence of the 2017 film “Valerian and the City Of A Thousand Planets” a film by Luc Besson. Besson, as some of you may know, wrote and directed “The Fifth Element” (1997), and“Lucy” (2014) among many others and whose cinematic style could be described as adolescent and frantic at the same time.

In any case, I was taken by the pseudo time lapse display of mankind's evolution from it's baby steps in the exploration of space (some factual) and the almost naive future encounters with other alien species as we move farther into space. Moving forward in time, we see the 'simple' space station with which we are all familiar evolve into a mega United Nations like structure so huge that it is pushed out of Earth orbit to drift deep into interstellar space. I can't really recommend the film for reasons I won't go into here, but the clever insertion of David Bowie's “Space Oddity” as the background music as each alien encounter becomes more bizarre than the previous is nicely done. The visuals of the ship 'growing' over the decades as more and more sections are added to accommodate the thousands of species on board are, dare I say it, inspirational. 4/23/19

Valerian and the City Of A Thousand Planets opening (4 min)