From its inception science fiction is closely linked to utopia and shows distant planets, foreign beings and unknown technologies to instil reflections on a very close and well-known reality, our life on Earth and its perspectives. For this reason, cities, which are key elements of our lives and any utopic vision at the same time, play such an important role in science fiction works. This is evident in the feature Valerian and the City of a Thousand PLANETS (Valerian and the city of the thousand planets, 2017), one of the most ambitious and most expensive productions in recent years. Our contribution aims to analyse how the different cities of this Luc Besson film (the idyl villages of the Pearls near the sea, the invisible ultra capitalist city in the desert and especially the gigantesca interplanetaria Alpha metropolis) are used to reflect on increasingly urbanised human life on Earth. The fanciful cities of Besson illustrate to some extent some views of influential historians and sociologists of our time (Marc Augé, Achille Mbembe and Yuval Noah Harari) that serve us to highlight the message that the French director wants to convey with his adaptation of the comics of Jean-Claude Mézières and Pierre Christin. For this message, the striking presence of the grotesy in the feature feature feature is very important: in Valerian and the City of a Thousand PLANETS it grotesco not only serves to (re-) define the human, a goal that explains the very frequent interaction of the grotesal and science fiction in cinema and literature, but also supports the spread of universal tolerance. This tolerance characterises the first sequence of the film shown by Alpha’s foundation after enthusiastic encounters between different species in the universe. However, the egoism of human beings threatens peaceful life in Alpha (while at the same time causing the destruction of the Pearls planet, an important example of the Golden Age), and peace only restores with the help of Bubble, a polymorphy, who can be seen as the culminating point of the grotesal in the film. In fact, Bubble’s character, who appears to be a personification of a famous definition of the grotestic body of Bajtín, is exemplary that all borders are being crossed, which is one of the defining characteristics of the grotesy. What is more, I embodied by Rihanna, Bubble brings us to the transnational dimension of this feature, again closely linked to the grotesy and of paramount importance to the message of the work. This transnational dimension (the adaptation in English of a French comic by a French director with Anglo-American actors) is discussed in the penultimate section of our contribution. This concludes with some reflections on the series of Mézières et Christin, the Besson film model, and comics in general in which cities and architecture often play a key role as they see in French-speaking culture, alongside the series focused on Valerian and Laureline, Les Cités obscures (The dark cities) of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters.