Can we...can we, just, talk, about this for a minute? This is one of those films that you hear people talk about fairly regularly, but not necessarily in a positive or negative way, it usually delves along the lines of a bizarre experiment. Let's break it down just a little bit. It is French. It is
so French. Any more French and it would be taking a three hour lunch, go to work for an hour, and then take a smoke break. The film is also so nineties. Any more nineties and the Power Rangers would show up being lead by the Scatman. The Scatman. All of these negative elements (no pun intended) and it's still a very enjoyable movie.
I mean, to start out, we begin in Egypt in 1914, then jump ahead a mere 300 years later. The universe surrounding this movie is somewhere along the lines of if Bladerunner did a couple 8-balls and played Mass Effect for an entire summer. You know what? I love it. New York in the future is a very immersive world, with plenty of colorful characters, fast paced action, and even some bizarre humor, I really couldn't find a whole lot I didn't like about it. Bruce Willis is always a lot of fun, and many of you may be wondering "But...Chris Tucker's in it...Chris Tucker..." but even Chris Tucker wasn't awful! He plays an obnoxious radio DJ, so I'd call it perfect casting. In a world where everything going on around the characters is so over-the-top to begin with, Chris Tucker just sort of blends in seamlessly. Even right down to his introduction was straight up ridiculous. His first scene, he's wearing a skin tight leopard print jump suit with an afro that looks like Eugene from Hey Arnold.
The moods and contrasts in this movie are so inconsistent it's like going through pregnancy with Sybil. Some moments you have goofy tip-tappy piano music while at other times you'll have futuristic saw bass driven techno. One scene even has futuristic latin jazz during a flying car chase through the skyscrapers of New York. There's a blue alien opera singer (whom they refer simply by title; The Diva) who looks like an asari, hitting notes that I'm not even sure are humanly possible? I read they actually had to use somewhere around four or five different sopranos just for one scene.
There's a crazed, southern billionaire industrialist bent on destroying the world for some reason? I just have to talk about this for a minute. There is a scene where the antagonist, whose name is "Zorg." Just let that sink in for a minute...Zorg invites over Ash from Alien to his office, breaks a glass so he can show why people need to die so that it can give others work (I guess?), proceeds to choke on a cherry and push an amalgamation of different buttons on his desk which serve their own purpose, one of which opens a drawer with a tiny elephant alien that just stares at him, smiles, and wags his trunk around, just as cute as can be, looks like they stole it from the set of a live action Dumbo remake.
I'm sitting here, mouth literally gaping open just thinking to myself "What is going on!? Is this a science fiction movie? An action movie? An exploitation movie?" and by the end, the most appropriate answer I could come up with to those questions was "Yes." It's all of these, which is what makes it such a fascinating and fun ride. It's by no means a great movie, the writing is competent, but not remarkable. The plot is stupid as all hell, but that's not what this movie's about, it's about the ride. The last time I watched this movie was the late 90s, I remember nothing about it other than Mila Jovovich half naked, and as I was so pleased to discover now, in my late teens, topless in select scenes, so needless to say, the outcome far exceeded my expectations. Check it out. #thefifthelement #asari #robtroid
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