Headscratchers / Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

• If the Planet Mül was destroyed, and the only survivors were the ones that hid on that one crashed ship... how the heck did that one animal possibly survive? Nothing showed that they had one of the creatures with them and being a primitive planet, there's no way that one could have left the planet before. Nor was there any instances of someone visiting the planet before.
  • One (or some) of them probably sneaked aboard the derelict before the planet was destroyed, and the Pearls didn't notice it until the derelict was taken by the scrap traders. It can be very easy for an animal to get lost in such a large area, and there is a probable chance that it was found by one of the traders before the Pearls could get to it. Though the question of how it got to where it was is a bit of a mystery...
  • Given that they feed on radiation, maybe they are sturdy enough for a few of them to have survived the destruction of the planet long enough to be caught by the human ships in orbit. This would explain how everybody in the Federation seems to be familiar with them and their biology. The Pearls would have heard about the last surviving specimens only after browsing through the information available in station Alpha.
  • Apparently there was at least one expert on Mul who'd been murdered as part of the cover-up, and there were photos of the planet's appearance from before the catastrophe on file. Possibly there'd been at least a cursory visit there, but one that landed in a region where there weren't any Pearls living, just wildlife. Their total population was probably never very large, given the simplicity of their lifestyle.

• How did the inhabitants/survivors of Planet Mül, who lived a stagnant, "idyllic", non-technological life on a planet surface, without any knowledge of our technology or previous contact with us...manage to commandeer a broken spaceship, escape their planet, survive on a spaceship, repair the same spaceship, learn libraries of information, live on a scrap ship, sneak onto Alpha, AND build a second spaceship...all in the space of a few years since Commander Filitt led the armada battle above Mül?? And without being detected by anyone in charge (other than Filitt)?? Remember, Filitt was an adult during the battle, and looked not much older during the time of the film, no more than a decade.
  • Really, no matter how smart they could have been, it would have taken decades, at least, to do all of those things. Their feat is even less believable when you realize that we ourselves often can't get our own technology working correctly when it's broken, when we know how it works, and have the parts and resources to fix it. And yet some aliens without a history of technology, first contact with the Alpha cultures, or any initial knowledge of our civilization, somehow did all those things...??
  • One fringe benefit of being part of a society which accommodates thousands of disparate alien species, many of whom are a lot more inhuman than the Pearls, may be that technology is customarily made extremely user-friendly. If, say, an alien diplomat that looks like a squashed jellyfish and thinks solely in complex polynomials might have to figure out how to use the escape pods, the food dispensers, and/or the can unassisted on an Alpha ship, why wouldn't all devices be made self-explanatory by default?
• An average for a bachelor’s is 4 yrs, plus another 2 years for a masters and maybe another 8 yrs for a doctorate, depending on the topic. That’s less than 30 years, and they had all the information they needed from the ship’s database, according to the film. The fact that they lived an idyllic lifestyle, in harmony with their planet doesn’t mean they couldn’t understand or had the ability to learn. When we reach out to customer service for help with our tech, more often than not, we are speaking to someone in a so-called 3rd world country. Also, energy or power seems to be part of their physical make-up, like the pearls they are named after. Their bodies glitter and shine like xmas lights. Remember how the princess washed her face with pearls when she woke up? That looked like washing, but maybe it was breakfast. And remember how the empress was able to see her daughter in Valerian? She saw her energy. She woke the commander with a touch. She released her daughter’s soul with a hand gesture… There is also a scene in which the Emperor explains how they survived, escaped and learned.

My question is how they got a crashed ship to fly before the planet was destroyed.

• The Pearls attack the station and engage in a firefight - while almost completely naked?!?!?!?

• At the end of the movie, how did the magical pearls recreate the entire planet Mül, complete with its sky and moons, inside a fairly small spaceship? Possibly the whole thing was merely a virtual reality simulation of Mül, but then they wouldn't really have needed those ultra-powerful pearls to do it, as the beginning of the movie shows realistic VR simulations are commonplace in this universe.
  • I think it was just a simulation, albeit a large one. Maybe the VR simulator requires more power to render places that are physically larger, or to render all the time instead of for a couple of hours at most. Or perhaps the pearls were to power the space ship's engine so it didn't have to refuel at Alpha, and the Pearls created an interface for refueling that mimicked their old way of life. Yes, they could have rented a VR suite at Alpha but they wouldn't have been free.
    • Maybe the craft is Bigger on the Inside?
    • We see how big the inside of the craft when Laureline and Valerian are taken there: it seems to be about the size of an aeroplane hangar, certainly not big enough to hold an entire planet.

• Valerian can't enter Bou Le Bafot territory because it would create a diplomatic incident. Wouldn't cutting off their emperor's head create an even worse incident?
  • That part was obviously not part of the plan.
  • It was also more a case of avoiding getting attacked. The ending showed that he couldn't face the entire garrison on his own.
  • When Laurelie finds Valerian on the shelf, where the Boulan Bathor are fishing, there is a sign on the wall that said “deactivated”. Maybe it’s deactivated because they have fishing rights and no one should be there?Anything/anyone caught there is dinner as they are trespassing. Not only is there territorial sovereignty at play but there may also be “castle doctrine” laws. As for specialized eating tools, with a thousand planets represented on Alpha, I’m sure those specialized eating tools are not limited to “humans”. How many of us use a salad fork exclusively for salads or a soup ladle just for soup?
• What is the deal with the Bou Le Bafot at all? Alpha is clearly a human station as they are the only military presence, or they are at least one of the big fish of the council running it. Both Valerian and the General are aware of the Bou Le Bafot and seem to know that they eat people, but this is not common enough knowledge that Valerian's partner knows it, they have diplomatic relations that can be harmed by rescuing a federal agent from illegal detention... None of this makes sense. Why does the human alliance tolerate this? Why were the Bou Le Bafot not wiped out years ago and, even if that isn't an option, why do we apparently have to worry about the diplomatic repercussions of objecting to our citizens being EATEN?
  • From the Bou Le Bafot's perspective, that section of the station is their sovereign territory, and illegal entry is a capital offense. Eating people is just their preferred method of execution. Now that may be barbaric, but it's not too far from how things work in real life. If you're an American citizen and you sneak into North Korea for some reason, the North Koreans might find you, charge you with espionage or whatever, and then execute you. And of course the U.S. government will complain about this, but what else can they do besides complain? If they physically try to rescue you, it could provoke a nuclear war and a million innocent people could wind up dead. Presumably something similar is going on in the movie; the human government knows that provoking the Bou Le Bafot would have serious consequences, so they prefer to keep things quiet. (Though granted, yeah, there should at least be a scene where somebody attempts to talk to the Bou Le Bafot ambassador or whatever and he gets ignored.) IIRC, they only reference the idea that Bou Le Bafots eat people. It's not like they're murdering a hundred random humans everyday and the human government just doesn't care. Presumably the government just warns all humans to stay away from that part of the station, and most people obey, but Valerian and Loreli wound up in the danger zone because of their mission.
    • They have teams of human fishers and dedicated utensils. This is clearly not a rare occurrence. Even if it isn't just humans but all endoskeletal sophonts its enough that it should have started a war. In fact if it ISN'T just humans that makes it make LESS sense.
    • Moreover, even if entering their territory would cause a diplomatic incident, wouldn't kidnapping/killing a government agent also make for an incident? Referencing the North Korea example above, there have been diplomatic repercussions from them kidnapping Japanese citizens; this is the equivalent of NK operating such an operation out of their UN embassy in New York. You'd think that with an issue like this, if they weren't prepared to appoint a point-person who would fix something like this before the government agent became dinner, they'd be declared persona non grata. The fact that this isn't apparently the case suggests that the station's administration favors "dialogue" over common sense.
    • ^Then perhaps the station's administration is actually doing a bad job here. There are real-life governments that work too hard to appease an enemy they'd be better off confronting. See Neville Chamberlain, for instance.

• Why does the Bou Le Bafot emperor reside on the station? Why not on their homeworld? It's like Kim Jong-Un would stay in the North Korean office of the UN Headquarters. And why does the emperor squeeze that lemon-like fruit over Loreliene's hair? He is going to eat her brain, not her hair, isn't he? Sure, the viewers need to know what he is up to, but its a bit strange.
  • I think this ties in to my question (above). Short answer, nothing about the Bon Le Bafot makes any sense.
  • Yes, the entire scene adds nothing to the storyline, as a matter of fact. Though I liked the scene, nothing significant happens. Rihanna has her performance, and that's it.
  • The thing about the emperor could very well be a case of the ruler of each different group of Bou le Bafot is called an emperor. So he is the emperor...but only of the group on Alpha.
  • Perhaps he used to be Emperor of their planet, but was ousted from power. He fled his homeworld with a bunch of followers, who set up a piddly little "empire" in a low-rent corner of Alpha, where whichever royal cousin usurped the throne can't arrest or eliminate his government-in-exile without angering a few thousand other races for damaging their mutual space habitat.

• What, exactly, is the timeframe for the Mül replicators? Ignore the fact that no one assumes the Mül replicator is from Mül, no one went to Mül it seems before the big space battle 30 years ago. Then, the space battle happened and wiped out almost all of the replicators. But out 20 something protagonists apparently learned about them in school, and they were seemingly common enough at one point that they are common knowledge, and how to care for them is clearly know, but they are on the verge of extinction… So we have a thing that, logically, no one knows where it came from, is old enough to be part of the education of someone about the right ago for their discovery to have happened after they were at school and are common enough that they are well known in a galaxy clearly full of a lot of strange things but rare enough that they are all but extinct and can be cared for by their owners but have not been cloned or breed… This is hurting my brain.
  • Possibly "replicators" in general are a concept that is well-known, with biological examples existing on more worlds than just Mül. However, most of the familiar types only replicate quartz or paper clips or advertising pamphlets or whatever. It's replicators that can mass-produce magic pearls that are rare and nearly extinct.

• Another Bou Le Bafot related question. What are those cages made of that Laureline can't use her power armor to break out?
  • Seems to be a case of Forgot About His Powers, as she doesn't use any of the functions Valerian just showed the power armor to have or her regular martial arts skills even once she's outside of the cage. Or rather "forgot about her powers so there'd be a reason for Valerian to rescue her".
  • It would be pretty foolish of them to fish for people without having some means of disabling the equipment of their catch. Valerian probably only had the chance to use his gun before his gear was disabled because, unlike Laureline, he knew what to expect when he got hauled up.

• At the big market, how was Valerian able to pick up the pearl? His right hand needed to be in that interdimensional box thing to do anything, but he picks it up with his left hand without any problem.
  • The tourists needed helmets and gloves to interact in the Big Market. Valerian had one of those gloves on his left hand. The question is…how did Valerian get the pearl out of the Big Market dimension? It was never in a box…
  • The tourists could pick stuff up. I think the box was there in order for him to bring a weapon in, and bring stuff out without going through "customs".
  • He was kicking people and clambering over stuff and bouncing off pedestrians, all through the chase. Whatever sort of cross-dimensional linkage allows beings from our dimension to shop in Big Market, it isn't restricted to just what's stuck through a conduit/box.
• Why are the courts of the United Human Federation 18 light years (105,800,000 million miles) away from Alpha, when the station is only 700 million miles from Earth?
  • Maybe the rest of human interstellar civilization has expanded in the opposite direction, and Earth is no longer the center of UHF government (or at least of its court system).
• What was the point of the cover-up anyway? Why didn't either side in the space battle above Planet Mul offer to help the Pearls, a neutral civilization that got caught in the crossfire of their conflict, with aid and reparations for destroying their world's biosphere?
  • Maybe they just didn't care? Plenty of real-world wars have been fought without much attention paid to the innocent people caught up in the crossfire.

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