THE FIFTH ELEMENT (1997) Somehow, you just know it's French The Fifth Element is a sci-fi adventure so lightweight it often seems on the verge of floating away entirely. It has the kind of plot that you just know was one of the last things considered when putting the movie together, just thin enough to semi-sensibly thread together an odd assortment of characters, situations, action scenes, and special effects. This is normally a recipe for disaster, but the light tone helps a lot. One can only imagine a story like this with a kind of ID4-like self-seriousness. Nobody seemed to know what this movie was going to be about when it opened. The trailers were intriguing, and the hype about its grand vision of the urban future (and that it, for once, didn't look like Blade Runner) had me pretty curious. But nobody mentioned what it was about. After having seen it, the why of that becomes clear. Not that we shouldn't have figured that out already. A title like The Fifth Element alludes to the four alchemical elements of air, earth, fire and water - something most sci-fi fans stop putting much credibility in by the time they get out of sci-fi kindergarten. Before this movie came out, yes, we really SHOULD have been thinking "I'll bet the fifth element is gonna turn out to be love!" And, no doubt, for all the imagination on display here, the makers of The Fifth Element didn't funnel any of it into the plot. But then, the plot seems like such an afterthought that it's easy to ignore while I'm being entertained by all the Neat Stuff that's going on. That plot is, well, one of the fruitiest I've heard for this kind of thing. A giant fiery ball of "ultimate evil" has taken form somewhere in the galaxy, under the watchful and suspicious observation of some battleships. Savor this scene while you can, because it's the last time you can really take this movie all that seriously. We're told it's "ultimate evil" because the leader of an ancient religious sect (Ian Holm), whose order must be popular these days for him to be such a trusted advisor to The President (of what? I didn't catch of what), says that's what it is, and this is what his order has been waiting for for a long long time. It's gonna destroy us all (ultimately, it tries to carry out this goal by trying to smite us, with itself), unless we get help from the Mondoshawans, weird, waddling aliens who we first see in a 1914 Egypt prologue. But then their ship is shot down, haha! But a hand is salvaged from the wreck, the hand of the "supreme being" (bad, bad choice of words), the perfect human enhanced with enough genetic memory to carry out her mission. So, they put the hand in a cloning machine, which rebuilds this woman and even gives her a punk haircut. Can you buy Milla Jovovich as a genetically perfect human? I can, I think she's beauuuuutiful. Anyway, Bruce Willis flies a cab (cars all fly these days, and New York City goes up for miles), gets mixed up in all this, and there's an evil billionaire named Jean-Baptiste Emmanuelle Zorg (funniest villain name, ever), played by Gary Oldman, who plays him like what we might see if Ross Perot turned into a James Bond villain. And there's also a mega-flamboyant, pampered and yes-men-surrounded talk radio host (Chris Tucker) who...y'know how Prince had that damn symbol for a while? I don't even want to know what this guy's got. This is a movie where the sum of its parts are greater than the whole, I suppose. Everybody shows up to marginally do their part in the story, but they either don't know why they're here, or don't seem convinced of their own motivations. Take Zorg. His relationship with the big ball of evil is still unclear, even after it's explained. This ball of evil is capable of holding people in such a thrall of awe and terror that these people actually start leaking brown shit from their foreheads. Still, Zorg is basically an employee, asking for triple his normal rate, which he intends to spend...how, when the universe is destroyed? I can sympathize with the whole "chaos helps create life" philosophy, but we're talking about universe-wide annihilation here. For that matter, the big ball of evil, aside from its menacing entrance and a spooky phone call to Zorg, does very little to establish itself as much of a force; the meanest thing it does successfully for the whole movie is steal a bunch of satellites. Willis is fine, he can and often does do this kind of thing in his sleep. Nice change of pace to have an action hero such a starry-eyed, shameless romantic, though. Oldman is funny and Tucker, well, Tucker got an almost Jar-Jar Binks-like response to this role from a lot of people. Yes, he's annoying - but he's brilliant at it. It's Jovovich I really like, though. Since she's playing somebody who was, literally, born yesterday (hell, born this afternoon!), she has to balance between a lot of things - she's essentially playing a child and an adult at the same time, having been genetically programmed and prepared for a mission, but chances are this programming didn't include how yummy chicken is. I haven't seen a lot from Jovovich that suggests to me that she has all that much potential as an actress, but here, I think she's great and I can't think of anybody I'd rather see in the role. There's still a lot more here, like aliens who can shape their faces into human form with great (sometimes failing) effort, a blue opera diva who has a (disgusting!) secret, the bulkiest police armor EVER, and, of course, the sci-fi gun, which like the Lawgiver in Judge Dredd, can basically be any gun you want. This is a Kitchen Sink sci-fi movie. I happen to like Kitchen Sink sci-fi movies, 'cuz they show you that the filmmaker is trying. The science portion of this sci-fi movie is, well, alchemical elements, people. But I must point out that its "goofs" page at the IMDb has more "incorrectly regarded as goofs" entries than any I've seen. Of course, some of these are awfully big stretches. This movie asks so little of its audience, I'd be insulted if I wasn't enjoying it. It's ceaselessly sexy in a harmless, PG-13 kind of way (except for one out-of-place scene with Tucker). The effects are excellent, and almost every vehicle, room and costume seems to remind us that we shouldn't take it all too seriously, all while being things which are fun to watch in their own right. It's so nice to see a sci-fi movie that's so colourful, when it seems that most being made these days are consciously made to reflect something their makers must call a "style", all green, or all blue, or maybe blue and red. The action scenes are similarly silly yet still pretty fun, even though the climactic countdown to zero has the longest pause between one and zero I've ever seen (the whole business with the ball hurtling towards earth is also photographed in a way which is so spacially incorrect, it feels more deceptive than it does accidental). At 127 minutes, there's a lot in this movie that could've gone out the window. Dallas gets no fewer than three phone calls from his pathetic mother whose only purpose in the film is to harangue him occasionally about how much of an awful son he is. Tucker's performance may be outstanding, but even those of us who liked it can't deny that it's not long before he wears out his welcome, especially the silly scene where he, apparently, performs cunnilingus on a stewardess (other than to demonstrate that he's not supposed to be literally gay, why is this scene here?). Hell, that whole "launch" scene could've gone, easily. There's also a stop-dead scene in the middle of the film where Zorg demonstrates his own limitations when he chokes on a cherry. The Fifth Element is ultimately likeable BECAUSE it's so lightweight - most sci-fi movies these days are essentially either straight-faced action movies with sci-fi elements or excruciating wink-nudge attempts to be more hip than the next sci-fi movie. It's nice to see a movie of this kind which is so breezy that its basic charms are little things like the way Leelo says "multipass", or that shake of the head in response to when that old guy in 1914 sees the Mondoshawans and asks if they're Germans. I wouldn't want to see too many movies like The Fifth Element, but I'm glad this one's around for me to enjoy from time to time. BACK TO THE F's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE