THE FIFTH ELEMENT
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Entertaining if *really* ridiculous action-adventure epic from French bad-boy director Luc Besson. Expensive, and it shows, but couldn't they also have spent some money on a solid story, too?
There are so many good *individual* things in THE FIFTH ELEMENT, Luc Besson's gargantuan adventure-fantasy epic, that it's easy to overlook how they don't neccesarily add up to a good movie. On the plus side of the balance sheet, we have action, adventure, and some of the most lavish-looking scenes ever put on film. On the minus side, a silly story. A very silly story.
In the abstract, ELEMENT is great fun. It moves fast and always has something worth looking at, and for people who enjoy such things from movies (I know I do), it's very enjoyable. But there are limits. The movie has been (unfairly) compared to BLADE RUNNER, which is one of the few really profound SF movies out there. ELEMENT is mostly a loud action movie with some SF trappings -- and one of the most sumptuous visual styles yet put on screen. The mega-cities are big, but they looked a little more like really big *sets* than actual environments. Maybe that's deliberate, since the movie wears its ambitions to be entertaining pretty plainly.
The movie opens at the turn of the 20th century, with some aliens dropping in on an archaeological dig (Luke Perry gets a few cute moments as a junior archaeologist that Indy Jones would probably want to deck). Much mystical mumbo-jumbo is exchanged. Flash-forward to 300 years from now, when former military man Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis, being his usual self), now a cabdriver, becomes the unwitting rescuer of Leeloo, a genetically engineered superbeing that is the fulfillment of a cosmic prophecy. The rest of the plot involves securing four stones that can help Leeloo complete her mission of saving the world against a gigantic evil thing that resembles a sentient star.
I mentioned that this was an adventure fantasy. ELEMENT is only SF by accident; it uses the trappings of SF to dress up a basically silly story. But just because it's a silly story doesn't mean a fun time can't be had. The movie has an incredible amount of confidence in itself, even when giving us scenes that are ridiculous in the extreme.
Most surprising is Milla Jovovitch as Leeloo. She's given the interesting job of playing a character who can't communicate directly with anyone (at first), and she succeeds in making Leeloo a sympathetic and truly *alien* character. There is also a touch of philosophy in her character: What's the point of saving a race that is only hellbent on its own destruction anyway? I wish some of this stuff had been explored further in the movie, but that's not where the movie's agenda really lies. Also good is Gary Oldman, who holds himself slightly more in check here than he did in Besson's THE PROFESSIONAL (where his tics and mannerisms threatened to destroy every scene he was in).
ELEMENT is bound to be enshrined in the college fratboy SF hall of fame. It wants to entertain and be fairly bizarre. It succeeds in both respects. Watch it in a theater with a good sound system, and check your brain at the door. Sometimes, though, I wish mindless fun didn't have to cost so much.
Three out of four cosmic artifacts.
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