Review: The Fifth Element

Science fiction can be pretty adolescent subject matter. To date, at least three top directors have developed mega- budget science fiction on stories they came up with as teen-agers. First Steven Spielberg made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, an extension of his high school film Firelight, about UFOs. Then James Cameron began his current habit of making outrageously overbudgeted spectacles with The Abyss, which was essentially Close Encounters underwater, and also based on an idea he'd come up with in high school.

Now Luc Besson has gotten all his pals from the Paris runways together and made the visually dazzling, highly promoted, very expensive, very, very French film The Fifth Element, from a story Besson came up with during his teenaged years in an abbey or something. Besson kept the plot of this movie so secret that he wouldn't even tell the movie's distributors what it was about, but he really needn't have bothered. Although it has a couple of neat ideas, The Fifth Element's plot and visual elements are a jumble of recycled tropes from StarGate, Heavy Metal's "Harry Canyon" segment, Judge Dredd, Blade Runner, 2010, Dune, The Abyss, Star Trek, and another strange SF film from a Frenchman, Roger Vadim's 1968 Barbarella.

Besson has claimed in pre-release interviews that the film's subject matter touches on the same themes as Star Wars. What he means is it's about good and evil. But where Star Wars put that grand material into a context that let us experience it through characters we can identify with, The Fifth Element's lone nod to audience identification is the participation of $15 million Everyman Bruce Willis, as a cab driver of the 23rd century who has a mysterious, indestructible girl played by waifish Milla Jovovich literally fall through the roof of his flying yellow taxicab.

Jovovich is Leeloo, and she is the Fifth Element, a superpowerful being who is required to combine with the ancient elements of wind, earth, fire and water in order to head off an ancient, life-destroying Evil headed for Earth. Now that's a cool idea, except for the part about the ancient, life-destroying Evil we've seen head for Earth in about a dozen movies (including three Star Trek features). Besson even has the gall to include the insufferable scene from 2010 and The Abyss in which superior aliens view clips of WWII and atom-bomb explosions and decide mankind deserves to be snuffed. I want to personally thank all the sensitive film directors who have pointed out to me that War Is Bad.

It's perhaps to Besson's credit that he plays much of The Fifth Element as a comedy, and a particularly Jerry Lewis-like comedy at that. In fact, judging by Chris Tucker's phenomenally annoying performance as a Prince-like media diva, I predict that the next American comic icon to be enshrined by the French will be that Urkel kid from Family Matters.

What the film lacks in story sense it more than makes up for visually. It's a rare film these days that creates a completely realized future world (instead of spending its opening five minutes in the future and then flinging its characters back through time to a present-day shopping mall), and The Fifth Element is one of the most imaginative and dense science-fiction universes in recent memory, from its brilliantly kitschy costumes to its dizzying depiction of three-dimensional traffic in 23rd century New York City. The film's benevolent aliens look like spiky, walking copper pocket watches with little duck heads, and the presentation of a future luxury liner floating over the oceans of another planet is a true SF-movie original. The Fifth Element is worth seeing for its 23rd century automobiles alone. But the film's gun battles and Death-Star-style explosions, however technically adept, reduce its originality level considerably.

Eric Serra's score is pretty much what you'd expect from the composer of GoldenEye, but I have to admit that I'd rather see this sort of mix of techno-industrial funk and sinuous Easternism than yet another overbearing attempt to redo Star Wars. Serra's music effectively accentuates the exotic feel of the film and it certainly fits in with the campy drag show atmosphere that Besson often allows to swamp his efforts. Much less effective is Serra's reinforcement of every cutesy-poo pratfall with some mincing pizzicato wackiness that just makes you want to pinch the film's cheeks, it's so damned adorable. Equally annoying is his underscoring of the film's romantic moments between Willis and Jovovich, which come out of nowhere. Besson can't stick with any set of characters long enough for the audience to give a damn, so when Serra starts in with some heart-fluttering little chimes and piano for lovey-dovey stuff between the two leads the effect is revoltingly smarmy.

I certainly wouldn't buy The Fifth Element's soundtrack album, and I wouldn't want every science-fiction film scored this way, but Serra's score works for this movie. As for the film, I suspect this will wind up much like David Lynch's Dune (kind of an Italian Star Wars), as a movie that's always watchable for its art direction and special effects, but other than visually it hardly expands the horizons of science fiction beyond the comic-book shoot-em-ups to which American audiences have become accustomed.