"The 5th Element" was written about two decades before it made it to the screen. It was written by a then 16 year old Luc Besson who grew up to first direct good movies like "La Femme Nikita" and "The Professional" (aka "Leon"). The writer / director got some of France's leading talents to help back him in terms of costumes and scenery. He also had Milla Jovavich start work on the film 4 months early so that she could learn the fictional language that her character speaks for the first half of the movie, and apparently the director created the complete dictionary, along with the script, 20 years beforehand.

All this excellent care, nurturing and raw talent apparently equal one really bad film! Not a thing in this movie shows any sign of having been worked on for 20 years. It stinks! And I mean it stinks Real Bad!

I've seen many movies that either just had some neat stuff in it or else that I'm only moderately entertained by. Then the really bad stuff creeps in, and usually I'm able to ignore it because I liked what I had seen so far. Instead, "The 5th Element" is so stupid, and gets more and more flawed, that I sat there disturbed by a potentially good movie gone horribly wrong.

The loose ends jump out so tremendously that they cannot be ignored by the most hopeful viewer. Why exactly did Gary Oldman's character want to allow this dark force to destroy the earth, destroying himself, in the process? Just who was this Mr. Shadow that was the force behind the 'evil star' anyway? What was Gary Oldman's day job? He appeared to be a James Bond-type villain in that he was an industrial power-hungry ruthless man who also seemed to control the firing of millions of people. Yet he also single handedly tries to board a space vessel to fight his way to getting the mysterious 5th element. He is shown irrationally trying to kill a cadre of a warrior race as well as his own people. These are not signs of ruthlessness so much as stupidity. Why also did he seem to sweat WD-40 on two occasions? There was also a scene where he almost dies by choking on a cherry. How impressive, didn't Darth Vader almost perish the same way?

There seemed to be a love story between the scenes, but all we get are little glimpses of Bruce Willis falling in love, and nothing in return from the alien. It feels like something was cut out of the film. This surprised me since the film is over 2 hours long, and should have been cut by at least 30 minutes. Actually about 1 hour should have been cut out, and then another 30 minutes of quality film needed to be put back in.

The holes in the plot are matched only by the holes in the logic of the characters. There is an early scene where Milla is running from the same people who just re-grew her from some of her DNA. These were the good guys she is running from? Are they supposed to be bad just because there was the need for her to end up in Bruce Willis' Cab? Who are these 'good aliens' supposed to be anyway. In the beginning of the film they appear to be protective guardians (or are they just using our planet as storage?). In the middle of the film they need to ask permission to enter our solar system, and very quickly they are attacked by what appears to be much inferior villainous aliens. Don't even ask about the true purpose of the 'Diva'.

A lot about modern French culture can be seen in this film. There is a major backlash by the liberal artists against France's detonation of nuclear weapons. There was a scene where we see nuclear missiles just make an evil cloud grow larger. There was also a dragged out scene where Milla watched a video montage of war scenes (on a computer terminal I think) and cried realizing that all of man's inventions just seemed to exist to be destructive. I've seen far better montages from most 1st year film students, incidentally.

The costumes were good but for the most part ridiculous. Why would cops be in such unwieldy armor anyway? There were also many scenes of the film that felt like a French fashion show. If you see the movie "Ready to Wear" then you will know exactly what I mean. These scenes actually fit into the movie fairly well. The black feminine talk show leader feels like it might be something from French pop culture, but if it is, I hope I'm never exposed to it in American culture. Chris Tucker is not funny! He is just annoying.

The acting in this movie still astounds me. Bruce Willis seemed to just be in autodrive. There is nothing fresh or original in a single note of his performance. The reliably impressive Gary Oldman seems to be doing something interesting with his character, but his character wasn't written to do anything interesting. I had a hard time understanding whatever he was trying to say for the majority of the film. The only performance I liked (and this was minimally) was Milla Jovavich's. She gave the correct impression of someone advanced yet still in awe of the world around her. With her big wide eyes she reminded me of a young kitten fascinated by everything around her.

I can't stop at just the editing and writing. This is also a pretty poorly directed movie. There are way too many scenes of close-ups of the actors looking with inappropriate emotions at the camera. This goes on throughout the entire movie.

Some movies bother me because they are so close to being a great movie, but then a couple of ridiculous scenes ruin it for me. Unfortunately every 10 minutes or so this movie would drop another notch for me, and never rose back up. I wanted to see this movie primarily because I heard the special effects were on par with "Blade Runner" and were worth the price of admission, etc.. Some of the shots did look very neat, but had they effects as revolutionary as "2001: A Space Odyssey" it wouldn't have been worth sitting through the film.


Note that on my own review page I only gave this film 1½ stars.

The original review was written on 5/24/97.


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12