*Warning: spoilers may be found ahead. But if you haven’t already seen this movie, then drop everything and watch it right now.*
The Fifth Element is not just an excellent sci-fi movie – it’s an excellent movie. It predicted the rise of Elon Musk through Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Elongated-Muskrat Zorg and his flamethrowers. The Divine Language finds good company with Dothraki, Sindarin, and Na’vi as a fictional language people would rather learn than a real-life language. The fast fashion that people buy today grows more and more like the clothes the people and aliens wear in the film. Ruby Rhod has a personality as vibrant as any drag queen’s persona, and the priests are getting a little too savvy with memes in the worst possible way.
In all seriousness, The Fifth Element, directed by Luc Besson, derives most of its power from its tone: a mix of zany and serious that allows for a bright colored science fiction film that can still tackle intense themes believably. It allows for sometimes questionable costume choices that seem more and more likely as time moves forwards, but it asks questions that we still seek answers to. Sure, films like The Terminator might have predated it in asking these questions. It doesn’t detract from the fact that these questions are still relevant. All it does is make it more relevant because it makes these themes more fun, for a lack of a better word. Through the spectacle it creates, these questions become more accessible to a wider audience.
Milla Jovovich, playing Leeloo, and Bruce Willis, playing Korben Dallas, also have excellent chemistry as they progress through Leeloo and Korben’s relationship. Leeloo’s seeming naivety incites Korben to shed his seemingly uncaring exterior to reveal a more sympathetic interior; however, her later spunky attitude and powerful self-determination competes with Dallas’ overbearing and archetypally macho infatuation with her. Their relationship continues to evolve as Leeloo learns about what she has missed in the five thousand years since she last awoke and decides that humanity is not worth saving. Korben’s affection grows similarly, allowing him to let go of his infatuation and replace it with a much healthier form of love.
Just as impressively as Jovovich and Willis’ chemistry, the world that the film presents is well-built and convincingly futuristic. For one, it is bright and colorful – something often hard to come by in serious sci-fi films, except for the grim, neon-lit cities found in the likes of Blade Runner and Altered Carbon. Even when it can be found it is not always executed as matter-of-factly. The balance of neutral colors (or, the closest we get to neutral) worn by the priests and the officials of the Federated Territories plays well with the colorful and bizarre costumes worn by Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg, Ruby Rhod, Diva Plavalaguna and many of the minor characters.
Besides the careful construction of visuals, the ways in which police activities and simple things such as checking in for a flight or taking a flying taxi seem grounded in reality powerfully roots the world of tomorrow in the world of today. Whereas films like Back to the Future inspire us to make our world look like the world it envisioned, films like The Fifth Element extend the technology of today into something futuristic but plausible. Thus, the film doesn’t require any clunky explanation or exposition beyond what is required to explain the actual happenings of the fifth element and the divine light. Besson uses visuals and quick cuts to avoid any explanation for smaller moments such as hitchhiking on a plane or sexual relations between characters.
Overall, to keep it brief – because your time would be best spent re-watching the film – The Fifth Element transcends excellency within its genre and is a film that serves as a perfect example for visual storytelling and characterization.
Indira Ramgolam is a freshman in Columbia College.