The math of Valerian is perfect. It’s basically the director of The Fifth Element, plus a French sci-fi comic series credited with inspiring Star Wars, plus soon-to-be-Enchantress Cara Delevingne, plus perennially-wonderfully-weird actor Dane DeHaan, plus a massive world filled with aliens and cameos. What’s the grand total? The kind of intergalactic adventure movie sci-fi fans dream about.

Yet there are times—especially with sci-fi movies—when the parts are good, but the sum is terrible. Judging by the reaction it just got during its Hall H panel at Comic-Con International, Valerian is not that. Director Luc Besson, along with his producer/wife Virginie Besson-Silla, presented a series of concept drawings and scenes from the film, based on the comics series Valérian and Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, and it looks glorious. Filmed over six months in Paris, the movie, in which Valerian (DeHaan) and Laureline (Delevingne) embark on a mission to the intergalactic city of Alpha, is easily the most ambitious project Besson has ever tackled—and there are sill more than 2,700 visual effects shots to finish.

But there’s no way it could’ve ever been small. Besson has been wanting to make Valerian pretty much since he was ten years old and, as he told Hall H, he "fell in love with Laureline ... but wanted to be Valerian." Valerian, according to DeHaan and the footage of him in action that Besson showed, is a “space bro”—a not-fully-swaggering-yet Han Solo who depends (and crushes) on Laureline. The heroine, because this is a Besson film, is much more capable. (In one scene shared during the panel, Laureline took on two guards with the kind of ass-kicking traditionally reserved for your Lucy Lawlesses and such.)

"It's a long, extremely impressive list of female characters," Delevingne said when asked about Besson’s predilection for female characters like those in Lucy and The Professional, "and Laureline is that."

Another of Besson’s famous female characters is *The Fifth Element’*s Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), who also got a couple shout-outs during the Hall H panel. By the time Valerian comes out next July, it will have been 20 years since that movie came out. And in that amount of time, visual effects have gotten better (there were some 200 shots in that movie, compared to the thousands in Valerian), the Valérian and Laureline-inspired Avatar has come and gone, and Hollywood has finally caught up with the kind of female-centric worlds Besson specializes in.

“Twenty years ago ago, I was weird,” Besson said. “Twenty years later, the world got as weird as me.”