The Fifth Element (1997) Review: 10/10

Name: The Fifth Element
Genre: Action, Comedy, Science Fiction, Space Opera
Released: 1997
Cast: Brion James, Bruce Willis, Chris Tucker, Gary Oldman, Ian Holm

TL;DR: The Fifth Element (1997) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The Fifth Element is a perfect film. Not a perfect science fiction film, not a perfect action film, a perfect film, period.

The Fifth Element (1997)
10 / 10

The Fifth Element is a perfect film. Not a perfect science fiction film, not a perfect action film, a perfect film, period. Every element serves the same vision with complete commitment, and that vision is unlike anything else in the genre: operatic, maximalist, alive with color and noise and real joy. Luc Besson built a universe that could only exist in cinema and then filled it with characters who couldn’t exist anywhere but inside that universe.

The concept is deceptively simple. The universe is threatened by ultimate evil. The only weapon against it’s love, not as metaphor but as literal organizing force. That could have been insufferably precious. Besson makes it work by building everything else around it with such specificity and humor that when the emotional argument arrives it’s been structurally earned instead of sentimentally imposed. The film never announces its theme. The theme is the architecture.

Why It’s Perfect

Perfect is a word used carelessly in film criticism and I’m using it with precision. A perfect film is one where every element earns its place, where nothing is wasted, where the vision is completely unified from first frame to last, and where the whole is greater than the sum of already-excellent parts. The Fifth Element passes every part of that test.

The production design, Jean-Paul Gaultier’s costumes, Dan Weil’s sets, the vertical density of 23rd-century New York, is completely unified. Nothing in the frame is an accident. Nothing is generic. The world feels built from the inside out by people who knew exactly what it felt like to live there. The taxicab traffic. The restaurants stacked on the side of a building. The opera house floating in space. Each detail adds to a world that’s coherent instead of merely elaborate.

The score, Eric Serra operating in a tone somewhere between film score and opera, is doing the same work the visuals do. The Diva sequence, where the alien soprano’s aria and Leeloo’s combat are intercut with exact rhythmic precision, is the film’s most explicit statement of what it’s doing throughout: treating violence and beauty as the same thing presented in different tones.

For Writers The Fifth Element shows that tonal consistency is more important than tonal seriousness. The film works in comedy, opera, action, and romance, sometimes in the same scene, and none of these tones undercut the others because Besson committed to all of them with equal conviction. The failure mode for ambitious tonal range is hedging: softening the comedy so it doesn’t undermine the drama, pulling back from emotion so it doesn’t embarrass the action. Besson committed fully in every direction. Full commitment produces coherence. Hedging produces incoherence that audiences feel as unease without being able to name.

The Performances

Bruce Willis understands exactly what kind of film he’s in and plays Korben Dallas with precisely calibrated reluctance. This is a man who doesn’t want to be the hero, who has arranged his life specifically to avoid consequence and who keeps having consequence land in his taxicab. Willis plays it straight instead of knowing, the only approach that works. A winking performance would destroy the film’s tonal architecture. Willis gives Korben weight and specificity and lets the comedy emerge from the character instead of from the performance commenting on the character.

Milla Jovovich’s Leeloo is one of cinema’s original creations. A perfect being learning about imperfection, her education in human nature at once the film’s comedy and its tragedy. The decision to have Leeloo speak in an invented language for most of the film’s middle section is the most audacious performance choice in it, and Jovovich makes it work by communicating everything through physical expression and vocal tone. We understand Leeloo completely before we understand her words.

Gary Oldman’s Zorg is the great villain of 1990s science fiction cinema, a corporate bureaucrat of evil so specific in his enthusiasms and irritations that he becomes funnier and more menacing with every scene. His monologue about destruction and creation, explaining his philosophy to a priest using a dropped glass, is the film’s most compact expression of its thematic argument about the nature of evil. Evil doesn’t believe it’s evil. It’s a theory about how the world works, and the theory is internally consistent.

Oldman plays Zorg’s conviction completely, the only way the character works.

For Writers Zorg’s glass monologue shows how to give a villain a coherent worldview without making them sympathetic or excusing what they do. Zorg believes that destruction enables creation, that he’s part of a natural cycle instead of an agent of evil. The argument is wrong, but it’s internally consistent and he believes it. Villains who believe in their own worldview are more interesting and more frightening than villains who simply want power. Give your villain a theory. Let them believe it. Don’t let the theory be correct, but let it be held with real conviction.

The Emotional Argument

The film’s thesis, that love is the organizing principle that gives meaning to consciousness, that it’s literally the fifth element without which the other four can’t defend against ultimate evil, is stated explicitly at the end and earned throughout. Besson doesn’t build to the thesis. He builds the thesis into everything from the beginning.

Korben’s willingness to sacrifice himself at each stage of the film. Leeloo’s crisis when she learns what humans do to each other, her conclusion that the species isn’t worth saving, her reversal when she experiences love instead of just reads about it. The opera diva who dies but not before completing her song. Ruby Rhod’s cowardice giving way to something else when it finally matters. All of these are variations on the same theme instead of subplots competing with it.

When Leeloo decides to save humanity, it isn’t because she’s been convinced by argument. It’s because she’s experienced the thing the argument is about. The film earns its conclusion because it spent two hours building the evidence instead of asserting the premise.

The Film’s Method Besson doesn’t deliver his thesis. He builds an architecture that makes the thesis inevitable. By the time the film states what it’s about, the audience has already felt it in a dozen scenes. The statement is confirmation, not revelation.

The Diva Sequence

The Diva sequence is the film’s centerpiece and its most concentrated demonstration of what it’s doing. The intercut between the alien soprano’s aria and Leeloo’s combat in the baggage hold is edited with exact rhythmic precision, each cut serves both the music and the action. Besson is making the argument that beauty and violence are different expressions of the same underlying force, and he makes it not through dialogue or theme but through editing.

The sequence also contains the film’s most visually inventive moments, the Diva’s appearance, her performance space, the translation of alien music into something that functions as film score while remaining alien. It’s a sequence that could only exist in this film, the highest standard available for any single sequence in any film.

Is The Fifth Element as good as people say?

The Fifth Element earns its 10 as one of the most visually original science fiction films ever made, a film that invented its aesthetic from scratch and committed to it completely, that found the right cast for every element of its story, that trusted its own comedic tone without apology, and that delivered its love story and its cosmic threat with equal commitment. There’s no other film that looks like this. There’s no other film that sounds like this.

Diva’s aria plays over the action sequence that precedes the film’s climax, and it works. That’s the shortest possible summary of why The Fifth Element is what it is.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Fifth Element?

The film establishes four classical elements, earth, fire, water, air, embodied in four stones, with a fifth element that’s love, embodied in Leeloo. The mythology is simple and presented without apology: the universe’s defense against the Great Evil requires a being capable of real love to activate it. The simplicity is correct, the film isn’t interested in elaborate mythology, it’s interested in what love does when it’s the only remaining resource.

Is Chris Tucker’s performance too much?

Exactly as much as Besson intended. Ruby Rhod is a pressure valve and a comic climax at the same time, he’s what the film’s comedic tone looks like when expressed without modulation. Whether that’s too much depends entirely on your relationship to the film’s overall tonal contract. If you’ve accepted the world, Ruby is consistent with it. If the world hasn’t landed for you, he’s the most visible symptom of the problem.

How does The Fifth Element hold up?

Exceptionally well, specifically because the aesthetic is invented instead of borrowed. Films that capture a specific cultural aesthetic date when that aesthetic passes. The Fifth Element’s aesthetic is its own, Gaultier and Besson’s specific vision instead of anyone else’s. That means it dates into its own thing instead of into something that looks like the period it came from. It looks like 1997 in the way that an original thing looks like the moment it was created: timelessly itself instead of timelessly contemporary.