The kind of tripe that passes for a feast these days

Rating: 6/10 (13 February 2000)

So this is what the art of visual spectacle has come to. "Fantasia" (1940), "Black Narcissus" (1947), "2001" (1968), "Star Wars" (1977) - I could add many other examples - were all thrilling in various ways. "The Fifth Element" merely induces a headache. I'll give Besson his due for having the right kind of general idea. He wants to give us a guided tour of the rainbow, and he has a good deal of success, in individual scenes. He knows that computers alone won't do the trick. The perfect lighting combines with set and costume design to serve up some lovely colour-cocktails: president's purple throne room, the villain standing in a corridor of weed-tinted green, the blue soprano singing in front of a dark indigo arches framing a ripe blue planet. But it doesn't always work. Sometimes Besson's sense of colour fails him and the result is a mess. And apart from his sense of colour he has nothing to fall back on. The design of the future - it's all visual design - is mostly a compendium of clichés, mixed in with a souped-up vision of the 1990s: an empty, hip, MTV flashiness. Some of the computer images work, but most of them - the traffic shots in particular - feature the kind of cheesy rendering and animation that will forever be the industry standard, if we're not careful.
Hipness - that's Besson's guiding star. He doesn't even care what his film looks like so long as he can convince us that he's up-to-the-minute and with it. I suppose that's why the action sequences are all underscored (and undercut) by ghastly techno-trash for which, as is so often the case, Eric Serra is to blame.
Apart from the look and the feel there's nothing to talk about without being overcome by deep weariness. The plot isn't hard to understand. At least, it's as easy to understand on the first viewing as it's ever going to get. It will never make any sense. Here's the central idea: once every five thousand years comes a great evil that will destroy all life, ALL life, if a magic ceremony isn't performed. The villain wants to stop the ceremony from being performed. The phrase "obscure motivation" doesn't even begin to describe this situation. Does the villain want to die? No. Is he acting in ignorance? No. Is there ANY way of making sense of his psychology? No.
If Besson had been content with a simple high-wire act of implausibility, if he'd been willing to let his central conceit rest unexplained, it MIGHT have worked. But he tries to explain things and makes matters worse. He can't even come up with some decent sophistry. Watch the first confrontation between the priest and the villain while bearing in mind that both players know that the future of all life is at stake. The advanced student who can salvage some kind of point from this scene should then turn his attention to the mysterious actions performed by the priest (a different priest) in the opening scene. It's no use: there's no making sense of any of it.
So far I've been kind. It's despicable as well as bad. Anything so soulless, that tries so hard to be hip and cynical, has no RIGHT to attempt such blatant emotional manipulation at the end.