Valerian and Disclosure: The City of a Thousand Planets as a Metaphor for Radical Contact.
Luc Besson’s 2017 space opera, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, is a breathtaking visual feast built upon a premise that the real world is only just beginning to contemplate: full, radical, and total extraterrestrial disclosure. Unlike most science fiction films that focus on the moment of first contact or conflict, Valerian plunges the audience into a future where humanity is already fully integrated into a galactic community. However, the film uses this brightly lit, multi-species utopia—the massive space station known as Alpha—to dissect the very human weaknesses of secrecy and corruption that currently stall real-world UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) and disclosure efforts. Alpha: A Post-Disclosure SocietyThe film’s central marvel, the City of a Thousand Planets (Alpha), originated as the International Space Station before growing exponentially through the docking and integration of habitats from thousands of alien species.
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It is a fully disclosed universe where aliens are simply neighbors, partners, or rivals. In this setting, extraterrestrial life isn't a shadowy secret or a fearful threat; it is an economic, political, and cultural reality. This portrayal serves as a stunning thought experiment into what the end-game of full disclosure might look like. It suggests that once the initial shock wears off, humanity’s immediate future involves adapting to a cosmic melting pot—a reality where human customs and governments are just one small part of a sprawling galactic collective. Alpha represents an achieved level of contact that current governments are only tentatively tiptoeing toward: a world where cohabitation is the norm, not the exception.
The Persistence of Secrecy: The Pearl People’s StoryCrucially, even in this highly disclosed, utopian future, the core conflict of Valerian revolves around a cover-up. The plot centers on the gentle, serene, and technologically advanced species known as the Pearls. Their homeworld, Mül, was destroyed decades earlier—not by an invading alien force, but by a classified human conflict. The human military, led by the film's antagonist Commander Arun Filitt, knowingly massacred the Mül population to cover up the devastating collateral damage of their own secret war.
The hidden, self-contained habitat of the surviving Pearls within Alpha functions as the ultimate metaphor for how governments handle sensitive ET information:The Original Sin: A catastrophic historical event (first contact, a crash retrieval, a conflict) is immediately classified and suppressed by the military.
The Hidden Truth: Decades pass, and the truth is maintained by a powerful few, ensuring the human public remains unaware of the crimes or mistakes committed under the veil of national security. The Threat: The only real threat isn't the aliens seeking justice, but the exposure of the human authority figures who perpetuated the lie.
The Pearl people’s desperate attempt to reclaim their lost energy source (the Converter) and find a new home highlights the moral failure of an established system—even a galactic one—to take responsibility for its past actions.
Fictional Openness vs. Real-World Disclosure. The contrast between Valerian's fictional universe and the current real-world UAP disclosure dialogue is stark. In the 2020s, the official conversation has shifted from outright denial to gradual acknowledgment, driven largely by US government reports, pilot testimonies, and the establishment of dedicated UAP offices.
However, this is a slow, "drip-feed" disclosure, focusing on non-human intelligence (NHI) objects (UAPs) rather than direct contact or peaceful partnership. Valerian proposes a radical alternative to this gradualism. It asks: If full disclosure were achieved tomorrow, would the biggest challenge still be the hidden history of humanity's past mistakes, rather than the existence of the aliens themselves?The film's most cynical yet accurate message is that the barrier to a multi-species future is not the technology or the alien culture; it is the fundamental human refusal to relinquish military power, confess historical errors, and dismantle the systems of deep secrecy established long ago.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is more than just an entertaining blockbuster; it’s a vibrant, colorful cautionary tale. It shows us a fully disclosed world and warns us that even after the lights are turned on, the secrets and the people determined to keep them hidden remain the ultimate danger to interstellar peace.
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