THE FIFTH ELEMENT

WOW

Words cannot describe how much I loved this film! Best two and a half hours of my life.

It is loud and dark, funny and frightening, heavy-handed but full of mesmerizing and carefully thought out detail. It is the cinematic equivalent of Rococo artwork.

Plot-wise, The Fifth Element treads some pretty familiar ground. There’s a massive evil monstrous thing threatening to destroy the world, and in order to save the day, a group of individuals need to team up to find the magical thing that’ll defeat the big nasty in the nick of time. But what makes The Fifth Element special is the way it takes everything to extremes. The threat here isn’t just a super villain, or an alien, it’s the embodiment of evil. And if it’s not stopped, it’ll wipe out all life on Earth in one go. That’s a pretty huge threat. The only person who can hope to defeat it isn’t some random teenage boy, or even a team of crime-fighters, it’s the Supreme Being, someone who’s utterly perfect.

Fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier famously designed the costumes, and his typically over the top style meshes perfectly with director Luc Besson’s futuristic vision. Oddly, for me, it tends to be background characters who get the best costumes – like the McDonald’s employee glimpsed briefly in one scene, in a fluorescent red wig with the golden arches built into it, or the airline staff with their skin-tight blue bustiers and matching eyebrows. Everywhere you look in this movie, there’s something worth looking at.

Obviously, Leeloo was a character who stood out to me. She's both utterly alien and totally relatable. She’s beautiful, vulnerable, awkward, and a complete badass. Theres something so endearing about her character, the way she so casually strips off her top in front of the male characters while they embarrassingly turn away or her "Multipass!" response- theres an innocence coupled with wisdom and an strength alongside immense vulnerability. She's everything I want to AstroGirl to encapsulate. But not even just her character, the whole movie! The garishness, the colour, the humour, Ruby Rhod, THE ALIEN OPERA! There is nothing you can't love about this film! As Gary Oldman described it "It's like Star Wars on acid."