As a hack auteur, prolific writer, director and producer, Luc Besson is a seeming contradiction. He’s spent his career churning out grubby, insanely commercial genre movies, such as his Taken trilogy. But within those categories, Besson manages to invest an awful lot of personality and eccentricity. Besson may specialize in trash, but at his best, he makes trash with heart and soul.

When Besson is working on a big canvas, as with 1997’s The Fifth Element, a film with the straight-faced audacity to posit that love truly is the fifth element, it becomes impossible to deny his auteur status. Two decades after The Fifth Element was a worldwide box-office success and attained instant cult classic status, Besson has made another magnum opus, another labor of love, another movie that is so personal that it’s essentially Luc Besson in cinematic form, in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.

Only this time, the critics have their knives out and audiences are staying away (the film has scraped a 51% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has only made back a fifth of its $177m budget worldwide). This is particularly bad news for Besson, who invested his own money into the movie along with his heart and soul, making this the most expensive independent film of all time and not one that looks likely to ever turn a profit.

It’s easy to see why Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is bombing hard. For starters, it’s called Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, a name that means nothing to American audiences. Like other high-profile, auteurist, director-driven science fiction flops such as Sucker Punch, Chappie, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Jupiter Ascending, Valerian is audacious, original and ambitious to a fault. Like those oddball flops, it’s clearly the work of an auteur willing to pursue his creative vision even if makes him seem ridiculous and laughable.

From a commercial standpoint, Valerian shares a problem with the aforementioned films that, creatively, at least, should be a virtue: it’s too original. In a world of cookie-cutter entertainment, it makes the mistake of straying from formula, and paid a steep price for its deviation.

These oddball science fiction flops are original in sometimes perversely derivative ways. Chappie, for example, is morbidly fascinating in part because it doesn’t borrow so much as it steals shamelessly from the earlier blockbusters Short Circuit and Robocop as well as the mythology and stage personas of the highly theatrical South African rap duo Die Antwoord, who unwisely star as fictionalized version of themselves. But amid this flagrant thievery, the writer-director Neill Blomkamp, who had slightly more success with District 9, has created something utterly distinctive and unique. It’s unlike any movie ever made, even the movies it rips off. The audacity of Blomkamp’s vision is a wonder to behold.

Just as Chappie’s DNA comes from Robocop and Short Circuit and the theatricality of South African hip-hop, Jupiter Ascending bears such a strong resemblance to the Matrix trilogy that its writer-directors, the Wachowski sisters, might have been tempted to sue for plagiarism if they hadn’t written and directed those movies as well.

Only instead of Keanu Reeves as Neo, Jupiter Ascending has Mila Kunis as a toilet-scrubber on Earth with a secret destiny as a space queen and Channing Tatum, in the role no one will remember him for, as a heroic outer space dog-man with magic flying boots. Needless to say, this resulted in a much crazier, much less commercial and infinitely less successful exercise in world-building than The Matrix but also one with a whole lot of demented charm and personality. Like Chappie, Jupiter Ascending is deeply personal in a way that makes its surreal awfulness oddly charming. The Wachowskis began their career with great films like Bound and The Matrix. These days, they have to settle for “so bad it’s good”.

In between making billion-dollar superhero movies nobody likes, and also movies about the Guardians of Ga’Hoole, the DC Cinematic Universe maestro Zack Snyder decided to make an overly personal, audacious, convention-defying oddball science fiction cult item of his own with 2011’s Sucker Punch. The movie has a curiously bifurcated reputation.

On the surface, Snyder’s film looks like an unselfconscious, over-the-top exercise in comic-book sexism, voyeurism and misogyny featuring scantily clad nymphets bumping and grinding when not marauding their way through violent fantasy scenarios involving robots and tanks and steampunk and plenty of other nonsense that gives fanboys hard-ons. Yet Snyder has insisted that his film is actually a meta exploration and condemnation of fanboy sexism and voyeurism cunningly masquerading as the ultimate in pandering.

Sucker Punch is a curious beast. It’s all about spectacle and visuals, yet it’s only interesting as a film of ideas, and those ideas are incredibly muddled and self-contradicting. Snyder might have thought that he Trojan-horsed a scathing condemnation of misogyny and de-humanization inside a movie designed to appeal almost exclusively to the sexist nerds it was in fact condemning, but the result feels awfully misogynistic all the same.

With their extensive use of CGI and green screen, movies like Valerian and Sucker Punch are following in the footsteps of Kerry Conran’s ill-fated 2004 science fiction fantasy Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which used green screen not just for specific effects but to create an entire world.

The world Conran and his collaborators created out of old Superman cartoons, adventure serials, the original King Kong and a whole lot of newfangled technology is visually dazzling but occupied by characters it’s impossible to care about. As with all of the other audacious sci-fi flops I’ve written about here, there’s a profound disconnect between the film’s visual mastery and its relative indifference to everything else.

That’s true of Valerian as well. Valerian has the courage of its fearsome convictions, and if you’re willing to overlook things like acting, plot, characterization, dialogue, character arcs, pacing, structure and leads, as many science fiction die-hards are willing to do, then Valerian is a nifty spectacle that excels as eye-candy even if it comes up short in every other respect. When the eye candy is as impressive as a dazzling set-piece where Rihanna, playing a character who is essentially both a commentary on the singer-actress’s public persona and a shape-shifting alien, morphs from one sexy, surreal getup to another, seemingly changing the very fabric of reality with her sensuality, the trade-off of everything for breathtaking visuals seems worth it.

The nice thing about science fiction movies as loopy and ingratiatingly heartfelt as Valerian, Sucker Punch, Jupiter Ascending, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Chappie is that they don’t necessarily have to be good to find cult followings and attain cult classic status. I would have a hard time characterizing any of these movies as good, but that sure hasn’t kept them from becoming cult films, and Valerian is on its way to cult status as well.

When it comes to crazy science fiction movies and cult followings, in many ways it’s better to be audaciously bad than good, and Valerian, like the earlier movies I’ve written about here, is noteworthy both for its audacity and for its badness.

I’m glad these crazy, audacious, personal projects exist because they make the often boring and predictable world of popcorn entertainment crazier and more interesting.

Yet I also very much intend to never see any of these movies ever again. Sober, at least.