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Beyond the Human Gaze: Posthuman Ecology, Imperial Nostalgia, and the Spectacle of Excess in Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
I argue that Besson deliberately casts emotionally flat leads to create a Brechtian alienation effect: viewers are not meant to empathize with Valerian but to notice how his “heroism” consists of restoring a human-military order that destroyed Mul in the first place. The final act, where Valerian returns the Converter to the Pearls, is not redemption but a Band-Aid on a genocide. Laureline, despite being co-lead, is repeatedly framed as Valerian’s foil—more competent but constantly sexualized. Her body is hyper-human (no prosthetics, no alien modification) in a film filled with genderless jellyfish and shape-shifting parasites. Drawing on Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity , I suggest that Laureline’s lack of posthuman transformation signifies the film’s conservative gender politics: women must remain “legible” as sexual objects, while male characters can merge with technology (e.g., the Igon Siruss character, a three-headed alien scientist). The film cannot imagine a female posthuman subject; she must stay recognizable as a human woman with a gun. 5. Conclusion: The City as Ruin Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is best understood as a ruin—a magnificent, incoherent artifact that reveals the limits of mainstream SF’s political imagination. Alpha, despite its thousand species, remains a human-dominated military bureaucracy because the film’s production context (a $200M French studio film, distributed by a Hollywood major) cannot escape the gravitational pull of empire. The Pearls, who leave Alpha at the film’s end to build a new home, offer the only true posthuman solution: exit, not reform. ---Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets 20...
Science Fiction Film and Television , or Journal of Posthuman Studies Abstract (150 words) Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) is often dismissed as a visually opulent but narratively shallow blockbuster. This paper argues that the film’s very excess—its baroque digital imagery, fragmented plot, and juxtaposition of hyper-advanced technology with retrograde gender politics—offers a productive lens for examining tensions within contemporary science fiction. Through a posthumanist and ecocritical framework, I analyze Alpha (the city of a thousand planets) as a failed multispecies utopia, where imperial nostalgia (the persistence of human/military hierarchies) suppresses genuine posthuman coexistence. The film’s central conflict—the destruction of Mul, a paradisiacal planet, by human military forces—functions as an allegory for resource extraction and ecological amnesia. Ultimately, I argue that Valerian ’s aesthetic and narrative contradictions reveal a deeper anxiety: the inability of mainstream cinema to imagine governance beyond anthropocentric, militarized structures, even as it revels in posthuman imagery. 1. Introduction: The Spectacle That Failed Upward Valerian cost $209 million, grossed only $225 million worldwide, and received mixed reviews—often criticized for its wooden leads and disjointed pacing. Yet the film’s failure is instructive. Unlike Avatar ’s earnest environmentalism or Guardians of the Galaxy ’s ironic nostalgia, Valerian presents a future where technology has dissolved biological limits (shape-shifting, memory transfer, dimension-hopping) but social organization remains trapped in a 20th-century military command structure. This paper asks: Why does Alpha, a city of over 30 million species, still answer to a human-dominated “Minister of Defense”? The answer, I propose, lies in Besson’s unacknowledged critique of imperial nostalgia. 2. Alpha as Dystopian Posthuman Ecology Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of “companion species” and Anna Tsing’s work on “contaminated diversity,” I read Alpha not as a peaceful federation but as an extractive zone. The planet Mul, destroyed by human greed for a rare energy converter (the “Converter of Mul”), represents the primal scene of ecological debt. The Pearls (the indigenous, ethereal humanoids) are forced into refugee status within Alpha’s lower depths—a direct allegory for climate displacement and border politics. Her body is hyper-human (no prosthetics, no alien
Dr. A. M. Sterling, Department of Film and Digital Media, University of Paris Department of Film and Digital Media