THE FIFTH ELEMENT
[Spoilers]
A film review by David Hines
Copyright 1997 David Hines
"Tonstant Viewer Fwowed Up"
Some remarks on _The Fifth Element_, "a Luc Besson film."
Story by Luc Besson, screenplay by Luc Besson
and Robert Mark Kamen. Directed by Luc Besson.
Rating: */2, out of four: bot-fodder.
I have a very special place in my heart for the late Dorothy Parker. "Who the hell is Dorothy Parker, and why should we give a damn?" I hear the masses cry. Mrs. Parker was a writer, fellas. She was a pretty good one, in fact, although today she's best remembered for her doo-dad poetry. There was a decent movie made about her life in the past year or two called _Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle_ -- oh, dammit, I shouldn't have said that, because now people will go rent the movie instead of going to the trouble of actually reading some of her work. Go to the library, will you, folks?
Anyway, the reason I mention Mrs. Parker here is that she was also a reviewer of the highest caliber: that very rare thing, a *good* critic. And in her review of A.A. Milne's play _Give Me Yesterday_ (in the _New Yorker_ of March 14, 1931) she describes how she coped with a particularly bad moment:
==================================================================== | The cabinet minister talks softly and embarrassingly to Sally -- | | "Ah, Selly, Selly, Selly, Selly" -- but that is not enough. He | | must tap out to her, on the garden wall, his message, though she | | is right beside him. First he taps, and at the length it would | | take, the letter "I." Then he goes on into "L," and, though | | surely everyone in the audience has caught the idea, he carries | | through to "o." "Oh, he's not going on into 'v,'" I told | | myself. "Even Milne wouldn't do that to you." But he did. He | | tapped on through "v," and then did an "e." "If he does 'y,'" I | | thought, "I'm through." And he did. So I shot myself. | ====================================================================
When I read that passage, I thought to myself: "What a terrific idea!" So I went to the movies this weekend with a .32 caliber revolver in a shoulder holster. And a cyanide capsule hidden away in an extra tooth. And a Sinclair molecular chain in my shirt collar, and a .22 gun in my pocket for fun, and a razor in my shoe. And, just in case, I took a tomato. I'm allergic to tomatoes.
And then I sat down and watched _The Fifth Element_.
Thinking back on it now, I can't recall when I first attempted suicide during the film. I think it was just after the opening credits, when the archaeologist Dr. Exposition explained that the universe was divided into Good Guys and Bad Guys, and that the Bad Guys, who come every five thousand years to attempt to destroy All Life, can only be defeated by people who combine the powers of Earth, Wind, Water, Fire, and... you guessed it, boyos, Heart, the eponymous Fifth Element. When I realized Luc Besson was proudly presenting to us "Captain Planet: the Motion Picture," I pressed that .32 revolver to my head and pulled the trigger till the gun was empty.
Unfortunately, my aim is poor and I missed, and then the theater's emergency restraints kicked in and shackled my limbs and propped my eyes open -- and I was stuck, unable to get to my instruments of self- destruction. I resolved to use the cyanide tooth as a last resort, and screwed up my courage to watch the flick.
And if watching was all I'd been doing, I probably would have found it fairly enjoyable. Visually, at least, _The Fifth Element_ is pretty cool. As far as the writing and direction goes, it's trite, laughable, sub-moronic, pathetic, offensive, execrable, overdone, and dopey; it may induce vomiting, headache, dizziness, sterility, and hatred for almost everyone involved with the flick... but _The Fifth Element_ is a very pretty film.
But then again, _The Fifth Element_ cost ninety million dollars.
For that much money, it had better be pretty. And it is; it really is. Jean-Paul Gaultier did the costuming, which is very interesting to look at. The sets are large and well-detailed, and effects are digitally composited with the sets to terrific effect. The aliens are really alien-looking, which is nice, and although there are few different kinds of aliens, there are a *lot* of each species; the animatronics bill alone must have been sky-high. The spaceships look good, and the flying cars are nothing short of flat-out terrific: beautiful individual design, and the multi-level traffic flow is a thing to behold. I like to watch lots of things moving around, and the effects people on _The Fifth Element_ did some great work with that, especially in a great series of shots in which Bruce Willis's character drives his cab downwards through several layers of traffic. I also particularly liked the flying restaurant that makes door-to- door (or rather, window-to-window) service.
Unfortunately, movie theaters don't come with mute buttons.
Visually, _The Fifth Element_ is tasty. Its plot, dialogue, and direction, however, are utter crud. Not only is it tripe, it is pretentious tripe. It is an unceasing barrage of moronic cliches that were outdated when its star was still in utero. It is offensive. It is yecchy. It shines, all right -- like a dead mackerel. Squirming there, in the dark, I longed for _Independence Day_ -- yeah, ID was a dumb-as-rocks movie, but at least it was unpretentious. _The Fifth Element_ is an example of the kind of crud that we can get when a movie director thinks he's some sort of artistic genius -- Besson is not, and his efforts to prove he is only hurt his film. In vain efforts to prove his artistic merit, he piles symmetry on top of symmetry, cuts from one location to another several times in the course of scenes to track parallel conversations, sets the action of one scene to the soundtrack of another... and in the end, it's pointless. The effect is more grotesque than effective: a plainitive cry of "Look, Ma, see how *nice* I'm directing!"
And when I say grotesque, I mean it. Besson's idea of humor is to give us a simpering, prancing, effeminate stereotype as a talk-show host, and to then juxtapose scenes of pre-flight and take-off of a spaceliner with scenes of the said fop's seduction and bringing to orgasm of a stewardess. Nor is Besson content to limit his use of the nauseating beast to one scene; he has him prance and flounce and pout and lisp and whine his way through the rest of the film, and latch on to Bruce Willis's character to panic and roll his eyes and provide a little comic relief. _The Celluloid Closet_ points out that one common Hollywood tool is to have bad things happen to people outside mainstream gender boundaries -- that is, they're there to flaunt themselves, to vex the audience's sense of propriety, and then give the audience joy by dying in nasty ways.
Does it say anything about the degree to which this creation annoys that I, who deplore both stereotypes and political correctness, was hoping Besson would kill him off and get it over with, instead of rubbing our noses in idiocy? Does it say anything that I, an SF fan of impeccable taste, found the fop more annoying than _Star Trek: Voyager_'s Neelix? Does it say anything that I, an MST3K fan who ordinarily would welcome the opportunity to make jokes about Dennis Rodman getting his own talk show, curled up in pain and whimpered?
The plot is laughable. Really laughable. The deal is that these Bad Guys come around again, and zap things, and will blow up earth if they're not stopped. So the Good Guys have this weapon, right, in a temple in Egypt: combine the McGuffins, er, I mean, stones representing each element, open 'em, stick the Fifth Element in the center, and Captain Planet zaps the Bad Guys to kingdom come.
Only, see, the aliens who are Good Guys took the stones out of the temple for some damn reason. So they have to get 'em back to Earth. And the alien they send to tell people how to fix the situation gets scragged by some of the Bad Guys' lackeys before he lands. So scientists clone him, and the clone turns out to be this chick Lee-Eluukulaniromanadvoratrelundar or some stuff like that, who goes by Lee-Eluu for short. She's played by Milla Jovovich, who says she dedicated herself so seriously to the role that she even took the drastic step of giving up pot for the duration of filming -- which is ironic, because she looks like a junkie. Anyway, Lee-Eluu, being no fan of confinement, escapes the unescapable cell in her Jean-Paul Gaultier bandage dress and takes a suicide plunge. Only she doesn't die, see, 'cause there's this cabdriver, played by Bruce Willis, whose cab conveniently breaks her fall. She doesn't speak English (hey, she's just a clone), but she speaks at ninety miles a minute in an alien language and reads English. She convinces him to take her to this priest of a sect that understands her, and they find out the stones are on this far-off pleasure planet and they go there with the priest and this disk jockey and have to fight to get the stones.
Only there's this other guy Zorg, played by Gary Oldman, who wants the stones 'cause he's with the Bad Guys, for no reasons that make sense. Zorg says he's pro-chaos because it creates jobs, but the bad guys don't spread chaos; they just make people dead. No potential for being an evil megabusinessman there. But anyway, Zorg wants the stones, not to mention the heads of Our Heroes. And Zorg has a whole lot of ugly lackeys, some of whom want to kill him too. And Our Heroes fly around and fight Zorg and his henchmen and listen to opera and have some wacky good times and kick butt until Lee-Eluu finds out about war and wonders whether humanity is really worth saving, but then Bruce Willis's character kisses her so she decides what the heck and stops the Bad Guys from incinerating Earth. He must be a good kisser.
You think that reads stupid? Imagine what it's like *watching* it.
_The Fifth Element_ can't even beg off on the grounds of being intentionally low-brow, like _Independence Day_. The flick is a wretched mixed bag that tries to be too many things -- and ultimately is none of them. It's too trashy to be taken seriously, but too pretentious to be enjoyed as comic-book camp or as guilty pleasure. The stunning images, too, are a mish-mash, one that's almost entirely referential: images, effects, and costumes are derived from from _Blade Runner_, _2001_, _Star Wars_, _Brazil_, you name it. _The Fifth Element_ is an extravagant and ugly hodgepodge, a chimaera of skiffy films and 1930s pulps. It is a patchwork quilt stitched by an idiot, full of light and color and signifying nothing. It is a waste of ninety million smackers and of time and of talent and of however damn much you pay for a ticket.
My recommendation: don't waste your time.
Oh, and the cyanide tooth turned out to be defective, but after I got out of the movie, I did kill myself messily with about everything I had: the backup pistol, the razor blade, the Sinclair molecular chain. But I'm saving the tomato.
I wanna throw it at Luc Besson.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- | David Hines d-hines@uchicago.edu | | http://student-www.uchicago.edu/users/dzhines | ====================================================================
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