New York cab driver Korben Dallas didn’t mean to be a hero, but he just picked up the kind of fare that only comes along every five thousand years: A perfect beauty, a perfect being, a perfect weapon. Together, they must save the world. Bruce Willis, Milla Jovovich, and Gary Oldman star in acclaimed director Luc Besson’s outrageous sci-fi adventure, an extravagantly styled tale of good against evil set in an unbelievable twenty-third century world. Now fully rem …
Source: The Fifth Element
About the Movie
Every 5,000 years, a great evil returns to destroy all life, and the only defense is a weapon of five elements — four stones and a fifth, a supreme being. In 23rd-century New York, that fifth element, Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), literally falls from the sky into the flying taxi of Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis), a washed-out ex-soldier who would really rather be left alone.
Ancient priests, a flamboyant radio host (Chris Tucker, in a performance that steals every scene it touches), a megalomaniac industrialist (Gary Oldman) serving the Great Evil, and an opera-singing alien diva all converge on the same quest: assemble the stones before the darkness reaches Earth. Luc Besson packs it as a race across a candy-colored future of flying traffic jams, matchbook-sized apartments, and cigarettes that are mostly filter.
Why This Movie Matters to Sci-Fi
The Fifth Element is one of the most influential pieces of science-fiction design ever filmed. Besson shot a script he had drafted as a teenager and had the future designed by comic artists Moebius and Jean-Claude Mézières, with costumes by Jean Paul Gaultier — the result is a 23rd century that looks like nothing before or since, endlessly copied in games, animation, and advertising. It was the most expensive European film ever made at the time, a global hit that proved non-American sci-fi could own the world box office, and Leeloo’s “multipass” world remains a touchstone of optimistic, joyful space opera in a genre that usually defaults to grim.
