Official trailer
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.
This film makes me happy from the first frame to the last. It’s loud and ridiculous and drenched in color, and I wouldn’t change a single thing in it, Ruby Rhod’s shrieking included. Besson swings for everything at once, and I can’t think of another science fiction movie that commits this hard to its own strangeness.
The concept is simple on its face. Ultimate evil threatens the universe, and the only weapon against it is love, meant as a literal force and more than a metaphor. That could have been insufferably precious. Besson makes it work by building everything around it with so much specificity and humor that when the emotional argument arrives, it feels earned. He folds the theme into the story’s machinery and trusts me to find it there.
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 belongs, 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.
The Performances
Bruce Willis understands exactly what kind of film he’s in and plays Korben Dallas with carefully measured reluctance. This is a man who doesn’t want to be the hero, who has arranged his life 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 tone. Willis gives Korben weight and detail 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, and he’s my favorite thing in a film full of favorite things. His irritations make me laugh, and the speech with the dropped glass gives me a chill.
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’s because she’s experienced the thing the argument is about. The conclusion works because the film spent two hours building the evidence instead of asserting the premise.
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 works as film score while remaining alien. It could only exist in this film. I think it’s the most purely joyful stretch of filmmaking in 1990s science fiction, and I wouldn’t cut a frame of it.
Is The Fifth Element as good as people say?
The Fifth Element gets its 10 as a science fiction film of rare visual originality, 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 summary of why The Fifth Element gets a 10. Every other big science fiction movie of its decade looks timid next to it, and I can’t find a single wasted element to complain about, so the number goes all the way up.
