The Fifth Element was the best movie ever made. I watched the film for the first time when I was a kid. Of course, I remembered little except that the movie entailed chaotic shootouts, a giant fireball, and an orange hair girl jumping off of a building. Cool but mid. That was the opinion of yours truly when he was 10. Recently I rewatched The Fifth Element after coming across a Gen X on substack, who painstakingly insisted that it was THE movie of his generation. Well. That’s quite a claim. So, when summer rolled around, I decided to sit down and give it a second viewing.
How should I put it...the film is ingenious. It is set in a dystopic Federation with vibes that evoke memories of Star Wars: A New Hope and Wall-E. With its over-the-top police hovercraft chase, drag queen talk show, hyper-sexualized female service workers, bumbling men-childs, porn-addicted scumbags, flashy materialism, and semi-segregated multiculturalism the Federation simultaneously captures the best and worst imaginations of American capitalism. On the one hand, the film depicts an imagined society a century away, with aliens and spaceships and holy savior descending in the form of the aforementioned orange hair girl. On the other, the Federation is an exaggerated portrait of America. Exaggerated, yes. But exaggerated in a way that accurately reflects trends within this country. Fhloston Paradise is a space yacht in the movie, but likens itself more to a gilded palace. As over the top as Fhloston is, it is not a far-cry from the billion dollar super-yachtes today. Fhloston’s uniformly bikini-wearing service workers is also a natural extrapolation from our society’s increased sexualization, and increased commodification of said sexualization. As for the indigenous folks performing tribal dances for a living? The asian man selling Thai food with broken English? Well. They reflect America’s racial reality alright. The Fifth Element is forthright and sobering.
But the movie is far from somber. The Fifth Element is petulant, actively rebelling against the gravity of its themes. Luc Besson treats his plot, characters, and commentary with an essential irreverence. He paints American capitalism with all of its glory, decadence, and glaring inequality. He jabs his finger in everyone’s face and then rounds off the scene with another five minute long montage that expertly builds up to an impeccable sex joke. All this is to say that while social commentary makes a marked presence in the movie, it is distinctly not a piece of propaganda. It is a film, and being a film it never forgets its primary purpose to captivate the audience, to induce them into an epic adventure, and to entertain. It’s high quality art. Take the opening scene of the third act. Our hero, Korben Dallas, wakes up to epic beats in the morning, smokes a cigarette while taking a call with his old veteran buddy. In the short span of one and a half minute, the movie sets up an iconic hero with carefree demeanors that betray a forlorn romantic beneath his nonchalant acceptance of life’s struggles. Besson is expert in developing his characters. Not just the protagonist. All of the leading characters in the film are well developed with distinctive personalities, from the bumbling priest, the adorable Leeloo, to Chris Tucker in iconic drag costume. The film also features some of the best action choreography I have ever seen. Besson has this unique way of doing actions scenes where he interleaves two concurring action scenes such that it becomes a single stream of movements. Check out my favorite montage from the movie:
He deftly switches between several narrative angles, where events in different narrative frame echoes with each other and an action that a character initiates in one narrative frame flows seamlessly into another character’s action in a different narrative frame. What is remarkable is that this is not the only scene in the film that is so beautifully executed. The entire film is...well...smooth. It is a movie you can watch over and over again and still enjoy it. The Fifth Element is not a plots’ movie--even though it has an elaborate storyline that can fend for itself--it is a vibes’ movie. Comedic, ironic, and rebellious. The film has a good time dunking on American capitalism while carrying intrinsic artistic value that far outstrip its political snarks. It’s a piece of old fine art that embodies what modern social justice movies lack: boldness, authenticity, and craft. Of course, this film would fail the political litmus test in the 2020s. Its critique of female sexualization and over-the-top drag culture is sure to anger sex-positive feminists. And the movie’s depiction of racial stereotypes would not be sit well with liberal media critics either, even though it reflects our uncomfortable racial reality. We can’t take that shit anymore. Our society de-aged from carefree young adulthood back into the neurosis of teenage years. We are more sensitive. As Hollywood socialites know, every modern black character needs to be a smug scientific genius. An asian guy needs to be a multi-millionaire with a heart of gold. And women must be girlbosses and recite the girl power manifesto to the camera. You can never make the minority character the asshole, the superficial social climber, the edgy incel, or the Karen, because they cannot be associated with anything negative. And god forbid casting an immigrant actor with broken English. Those tropes are just too harmful, so much that we shudder to acknowledge the existence of people who are actually like that. The result, of course, is that we pushed our societal rascals and fob immigrants out of cinematic existence. We lionized the most privileged minorities--the geniuses and second generation douches--who usually also tend to be the most well-adjusted and culturally assimilated, at the expense of the visibility of those who are socially ill-adjusted or economically deprived. The irony is, of course, lost upon us in this post-sarcasm, post-subtlety age, and it is precisely for this reason that modern movies have become banal. The Fifth Element, on the other hand, delights in ironic social commentary but does so with a subtlety that define good art.
For example, Besson clearly criticizes the Federation/America as a materialistic dystopia. But the film is not a doomer-esque parade through late-stage capitalism either. Its attitude towards big C is nuanced. In fact, I think the movie delivers a vaguely optimistic message for our crumbling liberal world order--that the world is large and abundant with choice! Remember in this dystopian vision where human instinct are co-opted by capitalist incentives, elites become man-childs consumed by vanity, all while the common folks drink beers and scrape by like it was still the 1920s. In this weird wold, Besson chose to tell his story from the perspective of a war veteran with an otherwise ordinary life. Excepting his expertise in weapons, Korben Dallas is your average Joe—a divorced man bearing down the abyss of mid-age. Poor soul! He’s not rich. He’s not sexy. The elite culture that defines what’s snazzy had evolved and left without him. He’s a relic in a bizarre world.
—by the way, talk about subverting hero’s tropes. Korben is neither a man at the top of his game or a rookie starting fresh. He’s the mid-age hero. Too old to give a fuck but still has enough heart to love and save humanity.—
Regardless, what I wanted to say is that although Mr. Dallas is a social relic, he eventually carved out a nice piece of life for himself. He’s got his veteran buddy. Made friend with a priest and a drag queen. He found his special girl—one and only—in a world where odds seemed against him. I think the comfort this happy ending provides is that no matter how much of a misfit you are, you can always find your home, your people because the world is damn large and there’re all kinds of weird fish in it. Really, there’re tons of weird fish in this movie. There’s a drag queen with penis wig:
a hippie-dressing fascist technocrat (bet you never thought that combination possible):
a priest:
and then these normal workers you might run into in Texas:
The remarkable thing is these people all coexist in the same world, even though they are so different they might as well have come from different planets. It is wild! It gives off a magical sense of freedom that captures the appeal of young municipals like New York—that anything is possible. Anything! If these people are possible, anything and anyone at all is possible! This feeling of boundless potentiality is the central charm of liberalism and capitalism. I think this is part of what the movie wants to say as well: that capitalism leads to a future with shallow materialistic consumptions, but beneath this cauldron of excesses, there is a beauty to be admired too—the beauty of freedom.
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