The Fifth Element (1997) | MovieWeb (2024)

The Fifth Element

Summary

Every five thousand years, a door opens between the dimensions. In one dimension lies the universe and all of its multitude of varied life forms. In another exists an element made not of earth, air, fire or water, but of anti-energy, anti-life. This "thing," this darkness, waits patiently at the threshold of the universe for an opportunity to extinguish all life and all light.Every five thousand years, the universe needs a hero, and in New York City of the 23rd Century, a good hero is hard to find.One of today's most provocative and acclaimed filmmakers, director Luc Besson's works have captured the imaginations of filmgoers worldwide. His visually innovative style has marked the critically-acclaimed thriller The Professional, the exotic undersea adventure The Big Blue, the new wave thriller Subway and the seminal action film La Femme Nikita, the first major French blockbuster. Now, Besson teams with Bruce Willis, one of the most dynamic and successful actors of his generation, to take the science fiction film in a new and exciting direction.Columbia Pictures presents The Fifth Element, a timeless story about love and survival, heroes and villains, good and evil, set in a strangely familiar yet intoxicatingly different 23rd Century....The title of The Fifth Element refers to the four elements of alchemic Greek tradition -earth, air, fire, and water. Four elements gathered together to create the fifth one: life. Besson conceived of this energy -- the energy used to talk, to engage in sports, even to think -- as an actual, living thing that never disappears, but spreads throughout the universe and beyond.Though the acclaimed writer/director conceived of the story while still a teenager, he was unaware that the concept of a fifth element -- known in Moorish traditions as "Akasha" -- is deeply rooted in ancient mythology. Besson remembers: "When my father came across Plato's writings on the subject, he came to me with the book and said, 'Do you know that your movie is a remake?' I read it, and was amazed to see the similarities between what Plato had written and what I had put into the script."In The Fifth Element, Besson posits the question: what if an opposite form of life existed in another dimension -- one not made up of life-energy, but a dark, cancerous embodiment of all that is evil? "The energy of life, and this other, evil life-form, are opposites, like fire and ice," Besson explains, "and the more of this life-energy we create, the more it irritates and provokes this other."In the 23rd century of The Fiffh Element, humanity has wandered out among the stars, spreading this life-energy, and further agitating the dark being. "It feels as if we are asphyxiating it," Besson notes. "It is dying because of us. It wants to fight back, and extinguish every source of energy or light --animal, vegetable, human. But it has its own limitations: it is isolated in another dimension."The dark being's time to strike back occurs only once every 5,000 years when a doorway between the parallel dimensions briefly opens. "At the very beginning of the movie," says Besson, "we show that a way was once found to fight this entity, but the years have passed, and the way is forgotten. When our story begins, he is back, and no one knows how to defeat him."The setting in which this heroic quest drama unfolds is among the most fully-realized fantasy worlds ever committed to film, and certainly one of the most unique. "We looked at all of human history," says Besson, "in order to come up with what we think is a very possible scenario for humanity in the year 2259, which is when the story takes place -- to be very precise, the story begins on March 18, 2259, at 2 a.m. What will the evolution be? How will people live, and think? And how will that be reflected in the world? It seemed very important to me to create for this story a world that people can accept as a real possibility for the future."The result is a menagerie of weirdly exotic aliens: hulking, armored creatures with incongruously small heads called the Mondoshawan who, despite their imposing presence, work on the side of good; and huge, doglike Mangalores -- an army of mercenaries in the service of Zorg (Gary Oldman), the agent of all that is evil. The filmmakers also created imagery of a brave, new Earth that has never been seen before, along with an array of fantastically-imagined vistas on other planets and our own.