What follows, anyway, is an at-times incoherent action-adventure that serves as a tour of the fanciful sci-fi landscapes of Besson's teenage imagination: a mile-high pileup of towering skyscrapers and flying cars that still has the basic design sensibility of our modern-day New York City a luxury space liner traveling to the resort planet Fhloston Paradise, with Polynesian, Indian, and Italian influences merrily living in harmony and the curvy, neo-Art Deco metallic shapes that pop culture of the 1960s anticipated that the spacebound future was going to look like. And the fact that Ian Holm, one of the most cozily English-looking people that the British Isles have ever produced, plays a space-Catholic named "Vito Cornelius" tells us the rest.Īlso, "Father Vito Cornelius" is almost indecently fun to say aloud. The Franco-German mouthful "Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg" tells us just about everything we need to know about the proudly ludicrous European pulp tradition that Besson and Kamen were drawing down from, and that Oldman uses a Texan drawl (or what I suppose Besson and Oldman imagined was a Texan drawl, close enough) to play the craven industrialist so named tells us just about everything we need to know about the flatly goofy tone that the film intends to inhabit that pulpy tone with. Honestly, the most germane part of that whole paragraph might be the character names. We then skip ahead to the middle of the 23rd Century, when the 5000-year timer goes off, and the evil entity sends its forces, under the guidance of the human businessman Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg (Gary Oldman) to prevent the weapon from being assembled, while Father Vito Cornelius (Ian Holm), the current guardian of the knowledge surrounding the weapon on Earth, is charged with retrieving the its components. The worse timing for him, as the weapons' alien keepers, arrive right at that moment to secure it from the war breaking out across the whole planet right then. Might as well get that plot out of the way: The Fifth Element speaks of a cosmic evil force that appears in the universe once every 5000 years, and can only be stopped with a weapon combining the five elements: the four we all know and love - air, earth, fire, water - and a fifth element whose identity is a mystery to the British archaeologist (Christopher Fairbank) who uncovers the weapon's hiding place in Egypt in 1914. Which is, I admit, an awfully long running time for something with such a zany, insubstantial plot. But owing to the enormous quantity of stuff in the film, I have to imagine that very nearly everybody could find something in here of merit, somewhere in its overflowing 126 minutes. It's self-evidently not to all tastes I am personally the proof of that. So make of all that whatever you want, and in the meantime, let's dive into the goofball sublimity of director Luc Besson's deranged and delectable tribute to the gaudy European sci-fi comics of his youth (he co-wrote the script with Robert Mark Kamen, after a story he'd been nurturing since he was a teenager besotted with Pierre Christin & Jean-Claude Mézières's comic series Valérian, agent spatio-temporel). 20 years later, and although I don't think I could pinpoint when it happened exactly, and the situation has almost exactly reversed: I don't just love The Fifth Element, I'd be just about willing to commit in print to the opinion that it's the best summer popcorn movie of the 1990s. When I first say the film, I didn't just dislike it, I hated it, as intensely as I hated any of the big, loud, messy CGI-heavy tentpoles that were starting to dominate the marketplace. For me, there are virtually no touchstones in my development as a cinephile that more clearly mark that process than my changing relationship to the 1997 French-produce, English-language sci-fi extravaganza The Fifth Element. It is a great pleasure to look back over one's life and be able to say, with complete certainty, "I know more now than I did then". But I'm using it anyway, because I will never have a better excuse to revisit this most sublimely batshit sci-fi epic. This week: if we are being strict with words, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is closer to the polar opposite of a blockbuster than an example of one. Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases.
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