Five alive

Rating: 5/10 (2 November 2015)

I like my science fiction but this film was just so out there I didn't know what to make of it in the end. It started off a bit like "2001" with the future ominously impinging on the recent past but started to lose me the minute hulking aliens which looked like St Bernard dogs who'd been too long in the rain arrived on the scene to attempt to steal the secret of the mysterious fifth element. Along the way they make an uneasy alliance with intergalactic master-criminal Zorg played by Gary Oldman and threaten the world with an Armageddon-type peril. Lucky for us all then that maverick retired space-captain Bruce Willis is in hand to save the world, just like he would in "Armageddon" a few years later too.
The plotting, characterisations and cinematography are so wacky that you really do wonder what colour the snow is in director Luc Bresson's world, although at a guess I'd say orange. Willis gets involved when the newly but fully born Mira Sarvoni, literally what the world was waiting for, drops in on him when he's riding around in his air-taxi. Before too long, Willis is heading off to a far flung planet to try and get his hands on the four precious jewels which apparently are the keys to the universe before Oldman does.
Along the way he encounters a transsexual dee-jay / reality TV host, a hermaphrodite disco-opera singer and a veteran priest but unsurprisingly it takes a combination of fire- power and stunt work to save the day in spectacular beat-the-clock fashion and wouldn't you know, he gets the girl too.
While I was never bored watching it, I'm not sure I was ever fully engaged by it, its weird combination of campness and thrills just not quite working for me. Willis is his usual laconic self, Oldman goes for Ming the Merciless but comes off unintentionally as Dr Evil while Sorvino is just awkward and ultimately sex-less as the infant-savage with her shock of red hair and prototype mankini outfit.
Some of the scenes were literally eye-popping, like the first sighting of the air-traffic in the future New York and the explosive gun-fight at the climax but as a film it just didn't hold together enough for me. If the future really is this bright I should have worn shades.