The Fifth Element is Still One of the best Sci-Fi Films Ever!

Has there ever been a sci-fi movie crazier than The Fifth Element?

On May 9th 1997, a weird little sci-fi action flick called The Fifth Element was released in theatres, from the same man who had recently brought audiences Nikita and Léon: The Professional. And later on, the director’s new film, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – based on the French comic-book series Valérian and Laureline, which was, unofficially, one of the key inspirations for The Fifth Element. 

Story goes, the general concept for the film was something that director Luc Besson created as a teenager while trying to stave off boredom. The director would later claim that he saw Star Wars around the same time, and would be inspired to create a film on a similar scale…

but that when he finally started making movies, the technology was still too far behind to create the film he wanted to make. After enough advances were made, Besson would work for years to make the movie a reality, obtaining the funding and the talent for it.

“Like Star Wars on acid” was, how Gary Oldmam described The Fifth Element at its Cannes Film Festival premiere, who plays the villainous Jean-Baptise Emmanuel Zorg in the film.

It is a film that extols the average Joe masculinity of men like Bruce Willis—and then counters it with some of the queerest, un-macho, gender-bending male co-stars (Chris Tucker) that have ever been seen in a blockbuster.

It is a tale about the folly of humanity in creating the means of its own destruction—but still relies on the presence of Absolute Evil to bring about total annihilation. And Love, the driving force which will eventually destroy all evil.

ABOVE: Milla Jovovich as Leeloo

From Milla Jovovich’s urban canyon dive through the criss-crossing, vertical cityscape off 23rd-century New York traffic is a glorious piece of sci-fi cinema history.

It was divine.

Remember… in the second Star Wars prequel, Attack of the Clones, Ewan McGregor’s leap through the window of Padmé’s bedchamber into thin air: put a white bandage dress on him and he’s basically Jovovich fleeing the lab.

The Fifth Element also pays cheeky homage to its leading man’s signature outfit, the Bruce Willis Vest, which became a non-negotiable part of the actor’s image when he was clambering through air ducts in the original Die Hard (1988). The film’s costumes were even designed by world-renowned Jean-Paul Gaultier!

Korben Dallas is like most characters that Bruce Willis has played over the course of his career—sarcastic everymen who’s an updated version of the classic, cowboy archetype, cynical until the right moment comes along and something softens them up.

As for the flamboyant apparel sported by Ruby Rhod, (Chris Tucker’s) motormouthed pansexual DJ, it remains amazing to me that Gaultier and Besson had the ‘balls’ to even go there, and Tucker the confidence to pile in for the ride (and he does, full-tilt ahead!) The role originally designed with Prince in mind before going to comedian Chris Tucker. Rhod is one of the characters who divides audiences and critics.

 But love or leave him, the film would be a completely different animal without his presence. 

Then we have the main protagonists never meet their main antagonist (Zorg is completely unaware of Korben’s existence and vice versa).

Zorg, the head of an empire who can fire millions of people with a click-of-his-fingers. He may believe in destruction, but Besson has deliberately equipped him with faulty reasoning; in the film, he makes the argument that life is built on chaos.

Zorg is meant to sound smart and appear competent, but he is mistaken on the most basic level—while even the most inept agents of good are still plugging away at averting the impending disasters of their era. He’s a man that will do absolutely anything for a profit.

And at the center of the story is the titular Fifth Element, a character of great polarization among viewers, fans, and critics.

There is a sense that the scientists who reconstruct Leeloo from the Mondoshawan crash keep assuming that someone with such perfect DNA must be male (how wrong they were!) But Leeloo is no mere pin-up – and as one of science-fiction’s few female saviour figures, you have to go back to the genre’s cinematic beginnings to find her equal. She’s strong-willed, agile, capable off taking down all the bad guys with frightening fists, and she becomes a beacon of hope for a world on the knife-edge of destruction.

Her innocence coupled with wisdom, strength alongside immense vulnerability. Most of this is down to Jovovich’s performance, which is captivating from the very, first frame. 

Star Wars is the absolute pinnacle of Sci-fi movies, but Luc Besson’s film may have been a swashbuckling future-fantasy escapade, but to me, it hadn’t felt much like Star Wars at all, chemically heightened or otherwise. It stood out on it’s own, a great piece of filming and directing by a wonderful director with an overly sense of imagination.

The film jumps freely from comedy to action to drama—and back again. One moment we find our hero trying to hide people in his comically tiny apartment by squeezing them into hide-a-beds and refrigerators, and the next he’s watching a captivating blue alien sing a mesmerizing opera—and all this is set against action-packed shootouts and giant explosions as the forces of good and evil battle over the fate of the Universe.

And when I first saw it, I loved The Fifth Element – still do, even more so – from the first viewing in the local Hollywood cinema, until now, when I can sit comfortably at home, relaxing and watching it on Netflix and good-old DVD.