The Fifth Element

The Symphony of the Absurd

If the science fiction of the 1980s was defined by the rain-slicked, neon-noir cynicism of *Blade Runner*, Luc Besson’s *The Fifth Element* (1997) arrived a decade later like a Technicolor scream. It is not a film that asks to be taken seriously; it asks to be felt, heard, and devoured. In an era where the genre was increasingly obsessed with grim, metallic dystopias, Besson offered something radical: a future that was vibrant, chaotic, and relentlessly alive. This is not cinema as a product to be consumed, but as a fever dream of a teenage boy—specifically, the teenage Besson, who conceived of this world long before he had the camera to capture it.

To view *The Fifth Element* merely as an action blockbuster is to miss its specific, European texture. It is a "space opera" in the truest sense—melodramatic, ornate, and emotionally sincere even when it is narratively ridiculous. Besson eschewed the industrial greys of Hollywood for the saturated palette of French comic books (*bandes dessinées*), enlisting the legendary artists Moebius and Mézières to design a New York City that feels like a vertical ant colony. The visual language here is suffocatingly dense yet joyous. Flying taxicabs don’t just glide; they rattle and careen through a metropolis that feels cluttered with humanity.

The film’s aesthetic anarchy is anchored by the costume design of Jean-Paul Gaultier. In Gaultier’s hands, the future is not uniform; it is a fashion show of the grotesque and the glamorous. This is nowhere more apparent than in the character of Ruby Rhod (Chris Tucker), a gender-fluid media personality who essentially dismantles the stoic masculinity of the 90s action hero. While Bruce Willis’s Korben Dallas plays the weary American cowboy, Rhod screams, preens, and vibrates with an energy that suggests the future belongs not to the soldiers, but to the entertainers.

However, the film’s chaotic heart beats loudest during the sequence at the Fhloston Paradise opera house. Here, Besson achieves a synthesis of high art and pop violence that remains unrivaled. As the alien Diva Plavalaguna sings an aria from *Lucia di Lammermoor*, the scene intercuts her tragic, soaring voice with Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) engaging in a brutal hand-to-hand fight. The editing transforms the violence into a ballet, syncing the punches to the crescendo of the music. It is a sequence that encapsulates the film’s philosophy: beauty and destruction are perilously intertwined, and it takes a "perfect being" to navigate the space between them.

Ultimately, *The Fifth Element* survives the test of time because of its disarming sincerity. The narrative stakes are impossibly high—a "Great Evil" threatening to swallow the universe—but the solution is intimately human. Leeloo, a genetic superior capable of learning all of human history in days, is nearly broken not by a monster, but by images of war. The film posits that biological perfection is meaningless without the chaotic, illogical capacity for love. In a genre that often prioritizes the mechanics of how the world ends, Besson is far more interested in the messy, loud, and colorful reasons why it is worth saving.