Luc Besson was 16 when he started writing the story that became The Fifth Element. He was 38 when it reached cinemas in 1997. That gap shows on screen, in the best way and the worst: a movie with the untamed ambition of a teenager and the technical command of a director who had spent two decades learning how to build one.
Trailer, via TNT.
A Taxi Driver and a Sarcophagus in 2257
The Fifth Element opens in 1914, in an ancient Egyptian temple, where aliens called Mondoshawans take a weapon from a priest of a secret order. The weapon is four engraved stones representing the classical elements, plus a sarcophagus holding a fifth element. The Mondoshawans promise to return it before a great evil resurfaces every 5,000 years.
Cut to the 23rd century. That evil arrives as a giant living fireball and destroys an armed Earth spaceship. The Mondoshawan ship carrying the weapon is ambushed by Mangalores, mercenaries hired by industrialist Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg, who answers to the evil itself. From a severed hand in metal armour, the government recreates the sarcophagus occupant: Leeloo, a humanoid woman who remembers her previous life. She escapes, jumps off a ledge, and lands in the flying taxicab of Korben Dallas, a former special forces major.
Bruce Willis, Milla Jovovich and a Cast That Commits
Besson approached Mel Gibson for the lead, and Gibson turned it down. Willis was reluctant, coming off Hudson Hawk and Billy Bathgate, both poorly received. Besson happened to be in Barry Josephson’s office when Willis called about a different film, and told him The Fifth Element was finally going ahead. After a short silence, Willis said: “If I like the film, we can always come to an arrangement.” He agreed after reading the script.
Milla Jovovich won Leeloo from 200–300 applicants Besson met in person, a field that included Elizabeth Berkley and Diane Kruger. Gary Oldman plays Zorg. Ian Holm is Cornelius, Chris Tucker is Ruby Rhod.
$90 Million, London and Mauritania
Besson wanted to shoot in France but could not find suitable facilities. Filming went to London and Mauritania instead. He hired comic artists Jean “Moebius” Giraud and Jean-Claude Mézières for production design, and Jean Paul Gaultier for costumes.
Production stopped in December 1992 without warning and the team disbanded. Besson made Léon: The Professional, kept cutting the script, and got the budget from nearly $100 million down to $90 million. Columbia Pictures, a partner on Léon, agreed to finance it.
The Fifth Element’s Real Problem Is the Middle
The Fifth Element runs 126 minutes, and the first hour is close to perfect. The world is dense and specific, the taxi chase is a set piece built with real craft, and Jovovich gives Leeloo a physicality that sells a character who barely speaks. Gaultier’s costumes and the Moebius and Mézières designs give the film a look of its own.
Then the story has to explain itself. The stones, the diva Plavalaguna, the trip to retrieve them — the plot becomes a delivery mechanism, and the movie’s confidence thins. Chris Tucker’s Ruby Rhod is a performance of pure volume, and how much you tolerate it decides how much of the back half you enjoy. It is a real dividing line, not a nitpick.
The film won at the British Academy Film Awards, the César Awards, the Cannes Film Festival and the Lumière Awards. It also picked up nominations at the Golden Raspberry and Stinkers Bad Movie Awards. Reviews were mainly positive, though some critics were highly negative. That split is honest. The Fifth Element is a movie some people find exhausting and others find transporting, and both reactions are defensible.
Gary Oldman has been blunt about his own part in it. He told an interviewer in 2014, “Oh no. I can’t bear it.” He had explained in 2011 that he took the role because Besson “had come in and partly financed” his film Nil by Mouth. Willis, by contrast, said in 1999: “It was a real fun movie to make.” Jovovich called Besson “the first really amazing director I had worked with.”
What Holds Up
The Fifth Element earns its place on design and momentum, not on story. Besson’s script is thin where it should be sharp, and the third act leans on goodwill the first act built. But the goodwill is real, and it was built honestly: a 16-year-old’s idea, carried to the screen by the director who wrote it.
Key facts
– Release: 1997
– Runtime: 126 minutes
– Budget: $90 million
– Director: Luc Besson
– Cast: Bruce Willis, Milla Jovovich, Gary Oldman, Ian Holm, Chris Tucker
– Score: 7.6/10
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