Exceptional in every way

Rating: Null/10 (14 January 2004)

This is one of the rare cases I fell in love with a film immediately when I watched it for the first time. Admittedly, it doesn't put much science in science fiction, but it's a feast for the senses. Since Flash Gordon' in 1980, SF movies had lost their naïve charm. `The Fifth Element' was basically the only big budget SF movie of the 90s that was pure straight-ahead fun. It was painful to watch for example `The Phantom Menace' trying to be funny by introducing a character with a silly squeaky voice. And on the other hand, it was equally hard to watch `Stargate' trying to be dead serious.
Luc Besson had the concept for `The Fifth Element' in his teenage days already, and it shows. The movie offers fantastically designed colourful worlds and a whole menagerie of comic strip people with zero common sense, but not worrying at all. The villain wants to destroy the planet he lives on, just for the sake of being as evil as possible  other reviewers who complained that this is a screenplay mistake and not making sense didn't notice how that's poking fun at Bondish supervillains who point atomic rockets against Earth all the time. Milla Jovovich as Leeloo, the Fifth Element, is on a mission to save Earth, but already blown into pieces before she can say hello. Name any other movie where that happens. She is reconstructed after a piece of her corpse with the necessary genetic information was found. She escapes out of her glass tube to save life on earth (funny enough, French actress Mathilda May escaped from just the same kind of glass tube in Lifeforce' to destroy life on earth!). And it's not easy to look good in white bandages, with your hair tainted orange. I wouldn't want to try! Bruce Willis fits in well, creating his own cartoon image based on the `Die Hard' trilogy and the taxi driver from `Heavy Metal'. I'll never understand why there's quite a lot of people around who dislike this movie  I think it's exceptional in every way! Thanks for not making a sequel, because that probably would have been like telling the same joke again. A movie like this should remain unique.