Valerian is a plant whose root has for centuries been cultivated for its medicinal properties. It absolutely stinks but is supposed to put you to sleep. That anybody would name a movie after valerian is therefore extremely brave and perhaps a little stupid. But if doing brave and stupid things for the simple joy of it appeals to you, Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets might be just what the homeopath ordered.

Valerian, directed by Luc Besson, derives it name and its fantastical world from the French comic book series Valérian and Laureline. Created by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, the comic was first published in 1967 by the legendary house Dargaud. As a 10-year-old boy in France, Besson would “go to the kiosk every Wednesday,” as he recalls in the film’s official press package. One day he picked up a particularly engrossing comic. “That day,” he says, “I fell in love with Laureline, and I wanted to be Valérian.”

Besson grew up to be the filmmaker who gave the world La Femme Nikita, Léon: The Professional, The Fifth Element, and more. He’s a key figure in the so-called Cinéma du look, a term coined by critic Raphaël Bassan in 1989 to describe the spectacular visual stylings of movies like Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang and Besson’s Subway. In America, The Fifth Element is probably Besson’s most famous work. A bit of a failure upon its opening in 1997, The Fifth Element—in all its bleep-bloop orange-haired space-taxi glory—has since burrowed into our hearts.

Courtesy of STX Films.

That movie also drew on the works of Christin and Mézières. Valerian is thus something of a spiritual sibling to The Fifth Element, although it contains no material from the same world besides a bunch of blue goo. Besson claims that he had wanted to make Valerian for years, but the FX technology required to realize his vision was simply not available. Once Besson saw James Cameron’s behemoth retelling of Fern Gully, however, things changed. The fingerprints of Avatar are all over the worst parts of Valerian, notably in the people of the planet Mül, who are very tall and very nice.

The boring Mül open the first proper section of the movie, but once they’re off-stage the action begins and never stops. Meet Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne), heroic hotties of the 28th century! They spar with one another like James Bond and whatever woman he’s talking to; they fight like Jason Statham in wigs. In the first major adventure of the movie, the pair have to enter an alternate dimension on the planet Kirian, where they are to recover a tiny creature who is inside a box. It is impossible to tell what is going on at this stage but that is not a bad thing. Pow pow pow! Valerian bashes the bad guys.