The nineties were a weird, vibrant time for blockbusters as CGI came of age and the only thing that could stop you from realising your wildest dreams on screen was a lack of both money and imagination, however, nothing – and I repeat, nothing – was weirder and more vibrant than Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element.
First scribbled down when he was sixteen years old and presumably keeping that sense of adolescent chaos all the way up to its release when the French auteur was thirty eight, no one really knew what to expect when the highly secretive project was finally released, but it certainly wasn’t what we got.
Essentially an unrestrained splurge of creative juices that took the form of an unfeasibly garish space opera that tried to market itself through the sight of Bruce Willis with bleach-blonde hair and an orange vest, The Fifth Element was a bewildering, candy-coloured feast that defied expectations (and conventional fashions) to provide a fantasy romp that made up for a lack of coherence with a vision that remains bizarrely endearing to this day.
After a prologue set in 1910’s Egypt that tells us that an evil cosmic force is due to have its wicked way with Earth every 5000 years, we zip ahead to the year 2263 where the fashions are extreme, the recipe for McDonald’s is exactly the same and the ancient evil has appeared in the form of a murderous looking planet on the edge of our Galaxy. When a protector race of armoured, gold, ardvarks known as the Mondoshawans arrive with the only thing that can stop it – the fabled, mysterious, Fifth Element – they are ambushed and destroyed by the Mangalores, a warlike race working for the evil planet’s agent on Earth, gun-toting industrialist Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg. All hope seems lost, but when scientists use biotechnology to recreate whatever the Fifth Element was, they get Leeloo, an orange-haired, humanlike being, who subsequently escapes and ends up crashing through the roof of Korben Dallas’ taxi, a former major in the special forces turned cab driver.
The two are swiftly thrown into a brightly hued conspiracy that sees all involved zipping across the galaxy to retrieve the four mystic stones needed to save all life as we know it.
As Korben and Leeloo make their way through such outlandish scenarios as gargantuan gunfights, constantly switching allegiances and the unending screeching of effeminate DJ Ruby Rhod, they strive to grab the stones before the thuggish Mangalores or the scheming Zorg before the evil force arrives to smoke us all.
But even if the efforts of the good guys prove to be successful, can they discover how to activate the Fifth Element and the stones before intergalactic disaster strikes?
Anyone expecting that Besson would deliver a slickly stylish sci-fi in the the same mold as his earlier hits, Nikita or Leon was soon rocked back on their heels by the carnival of oddities that erupted all over them as the existential navel gazing of 2001: A Space Odyssey or the gritty fantasy of Star Wars was blasted out of the airlock of good taste.
At the time, people wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the excesses The Fifth Element heaped upon them, but now, with the benefit of hindsight, one of the movie’s major strengths is that for the majority of its runtime, the damn thing refuses to make a lick of sense.
Defiantly cartoonish and very French, the film constantly wrong-foots you as its story plays out like a LSD fused gumbo of Heavy Metal magazine and a self aware dose of Looney Tunes as Besson keeps things super light and utterly ridiculous in a time when dark and moody was hip. Tasking comic book artists Jean “Moebuis” Giraud Jean-Claude Mézières to visualise a future that feels like Blade Runner got a face lift by Queer Eye For The Straight Guy and allowing Jean-Paul Gaultier to run rampant over the outlandish costumes, there hasn’t been anything like it since.
The confounding directorial choices are are a wild as the visual style as Besson shifts gears with no apparent concern for maintaining a cohesive tone. Broad farce is employed directly next to gargantuan 90’s action while Bruce Willis suitably struts through the entire affair looking distractingly amused by everything that’s happening around him in such a way that I genuinely don’t think involved a shred of acting. In a counterpoint to Bruce’s minimalist, too-cool-for-this-shit, non-performance, Milla Jovovich acts her garish, orange roots off, being nothing short of utterly beguiling despite mostly communicating in either an alien language or broken english (“Multipass!”). In fact, regardless of what you think of her subsequent action career, her role as Hollywood’s premier, female ass-kicker started right here. Elsewhere Gary Oldman’s bowl-headed, buck-toothed, Southern-drawlling, Zorg is way too goofy to be a credible threat, choking on cherrys and tripping over his own plans like a self-obsessed panto villain and Ian Holm infuses his exposition spouting priest with a doddering, grandfatherly air despite bring kitted out like Obi-Wan Kenobi.
They all carry themselves like champs in the face of the unrestrained randomness and all deserve at least twice their fee for managing to stay professional in the fact of such insanity.
And what insanity. It’s a telling sign that one of the least brow furrowing aspects of the film is that the actor who played Deebo from Friday is cast as the President of Earth. We get a statuesque, singing diva alien that looks suspiciously like a bottle of Toilet Duck and beat boxes her way through renditions of opera; Chris Tucker’s devastatingly shrill, transvestite Ruby Rhod (playing far better today than he did back in ’97) openly engages on cunnilingus on an orgasming hostess despite this being a family film; Korben attempts to hide multiple people from each other in his tiny apartment like something out of a Morecambe and Wise routine…
However, like many 90’s extravaganzas, the Fifth Element runs out of steam before the end and anyone who prefers their sci-fi to be more composed and sensible will find matters endlessly irritating as the story cheerfully lays plot holes the size of event horizons. Why does Zorg think that working for a destructive, cosmic force that wants to destroy all life is going to work out for him? Why does everyone think that turning up to a space port and simply claiming they’re Korben Dallas is a full proof plan? Why would Leeloo scroll up a file on human war barely thirty minutes before she’s needed to save us? Why is Luke Perry in the prologue? Why is rapper, Tricky here at all?
Deliberately silly, Besson used The Fifth Element to display balls the size of moons for providing a dollop of sci-fi that’s a serious as a clown orgy, twice as noisy and three times as colourful among a genre that often pats itself on the back for being so po-faced.
Thanks to Besson’s unleashed imagination, it turns out that the most powerful element of all is the element of surprise.
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