The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec - 2010 is not one story, but three impossibly tangled threads.
Thread One: The Pterodactyl. In Paris, a 136-million-year-old pterodactyl egg hatches inside the Museum of Natural History. The prehistoric beast proceeds to fly across the city, snatching people, defecating on policemen, and generally causing havoc. Professor Ménard (Jacky Nercessian), a pompous academic, wants it dead.
Thread Two: The Mummy. Adèle returns from Egypt with the mummy of Ramses II’s doctor. However, customs and a bumbling professor (Jacques Mathou) complicate matters. She must use a local "psychic" (a hilarious charlatan) to perform a ritual to wake the dead. The Extraordinary Adventures Of Adele Blanc-sec -2010
Thread Three: The Inspector. A beleaguered detective, Inspector Caponi (Gilles Lellouche), tries to solve the pterodactyl attacks while simultaneously dealing with Adèle’s trail of destruction. He is the straight man in a world gone mad, and Lellouche’s exhausted expressions are comedy gold.
The film’s brilliance is how Besson weaves these threads together. By the final act, a resurrected mummy, a live pterodactyl, a vengeful professor, and Adèle’s comatose sister all converge in a single hospital room. The resolution is so bizarrely logical that you’ll laugh out loud. The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec - 2010
Directed by Luc Besson and based on the iconic comic series by Jacques Tardi, this film is a love letter to Belle Époque Paris. It is a unique blend of genres: part fantasy, part adventure, part comedy, and part period piece.
Unlike Besson’s more frenetic action films (like The Fifth Element or Lucy), Adèle Blanc-Sec is grounded in a literary, whimsical tone. It captures the specific aesthetic of turn-of-the-century France—a time of scientific optimism, spiritualism, and colonial exoticism—while introducing fantastical elements like pterodactyls and mummies. Directed by Luc Besson and based on the
Quick Specs:
Logline: A smart-mouthed, stubborn novelist races against time to save her sister from a botched resurrection spell—unleashing a pterodactyl on 1912 Paris in the process.
Adèle is not your typical blockbuster heroine. She is an anti-stereotype, staying true to Tardi’s original vision.