10 Things Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets Gets Hopelessly Wrong
6. The Fish People Are Idiots
The plot centres around a race of creepy fish people whose planet was wiped out by the carelessness of the human space navy and who are assembling the plot devices needed to recreate their world. They do all this in secret, blocking all communications within their region of Alpha, sneaking around the station making deals and generally forming the plot's central mystery.
Except there's no reason for any of the sneaky business. They could have just told someone of the awful injustice done to their world. They don't even have to hang around Alpha. They could just as easily live somewhere outside government control, like the touristy market planet Valerian visits for his ill-conceived opening mission, and used their knowledge of the military's war crime against them as leverage to get what they want.
What they want are the artefacts needed to recreate their idyllic world - and once they get them, they immediately bugger off on their spaceship, denying this self-replicating miracle technology to the rest of the galaxy.
So they're selfish jerks, too.