How The Fifth Ele­ment set the tone for mod­ern blockbusters

“I love dogs,” Mila Kunis’ char­ac­ter says when Chan­ning Tatum’s canine/​human cross­breed explains that a sex­u­al rela­tion­ship between them isn’t viable because he’s more hound than man. For all its many short­com­ings, recent films like Jupiter Ascend­ing rep­re­sent a dying breed of Hol­ly­wood film: orig­i­nal sci-fi block­busters. Free from the shack­les of lit­er­ary adap­ta­tion, these films can come up with even more abstract and wacky con­cepts but the Wachowskis’ 2015 effort showed how bad­ly that can go when lines like the one above make it into the script.

As a gaudy, galaxy-span­ning space opera Jupiter Ascend­ing got by on visu­al style alone, but it lacked a strong cre­ative spark – the kind of spark forged in Luc Besson’s 1997 film The Fifth Ele­ment, which cel­e­brates its twen­ti­eth anniver­sary this month.

Action-packed Hol­ly­wood block­busters have long relied on com­ic relief to inject some fun into oth­er­wise dour premis­es. Die Hard worked in part thanks to John McClane’s one-lin­ers; Han Solo’s ras­cal­ly charm pow­ered the first Star Wars film; Jeff Goldblum’s open-shirt cyn­i­cism helped light­en the mood in Juras­sic Park. Yet in 1997 film audi­ences weren’t pre­pared for the eye-pop­ping, sat­u­rat­ed visu­als and out­landish pro­duc­tion design of a film like The Fifth Ele­ment. Flash Gor­don had left its mark on the genre before Space­balls came along and sent it up, but a true-blue orig­i­nal sci-fi loaded with high lev­els of camp had yet to occu­py mul­ti­plex­es for the obvi­ous reasons.

Dia­logue is one thing but The Fifth Ele­ment has pure, unadul­ter­at­ed enter­tain­ment run­ning through its veins. Despite a seem­ing­ly safe premise – an inter­galac­tic romp con­cern­ing the recov­ery of four pre­cious stones that will save the uni­verse – Besson’s vision felt entire­ly unique and at odds with Hollywood’s mid-’90s out­put. Appear­ances proved mas­sive­ly deceiv­ing, as the film’s reluc­tant every­man took the form of then high­ly bank­able star Bruce Willis. Yet the expec­ta­tion that Willis’ Kor­ben Dal­las would be anoth­er wit­ty hero in the con­ven­tion­al mould would only serve to accen­tu­ate the film’s extrav­a­gant edges.

Oth­er instant­ly mem­o­rable char­ac­ters include Mil­la Jovovich’s Leeloo, with her stringy, neon-orange hair, and Ruby Rhod, an androg­y­nous, hyper­sex­u­al diva who works because of Chris Tucker’s shrill, almost pan­tomime per­for­mance. None of this should fit togeth­er to form a cohe­sive whole, but when Rhod is intro­duced late on in the film, he fits seam­less­ly into off-kil­ter sto­ry. Walk­ing innu­en­dos such as Rhod, still a touch­point for com­ic relief sup­port in sci­ence fic­tion cin­e­ma 20 years on, are a filmmaker’s dream and Besson showed just how effort­less­ly he could make the most out of a fairy minor sup­port­ing character.

Mod­ern block­busters con­tin­ue to take a leaf out from The Fifth Element’s book. On a pure­ly visu­al lev­el it remains a film to aspire to, but it’s the char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion and com­ic tone which real­ly sets it apart. It shows that you don’t need to con­fine your com­e­dy to a sin­gle char­ac­ter and that if you extend the lev­i­ty across the whole film you can cre­ate some­thing tru­ly unique. The Fifth Ele­ment didn’t skimp on the sci-fi themes either; its world-build­ing is effi­cient, its end­ing a neat mar­riage of the bub­bling love sto­ry between Leeloo and Kor­ben, and the high-stakes count­down to save the uni­verse. There’s even some­thing to be said about the vio­lent poten­tial of peo­ple and, more cloy­ing­ly, why every­one is bet­ter off work­ing together.

The baton has been picked up by a few notable mod­ern block­busters, with Guardians of the Galaxy and its sequel trad­ing off the same tongue-in-cheek irrev­er­ence. Today’s risk-averse Hol­ly­wood sys­tem may pro­hib­it sum­mer block­busters from being as arch as The Fifth Ele­ment, but it’s encour­ag­ing to see direc­tors like James Gunn embrac­ing the play­ful tone of and eye-catch­ing pro­duc­tion design of Besson’s film.

The Fifth Ele­ment had its cake and ate it, show­ing the way for­ward for big-bud­get, idio­syn­crat­ic sci-fi. A deft­ness of touch can be enough to trans­form an enjoy­able block­buster into a sen­so­ry feast. Luc Besson wrote the book on it, and his beau­ti­ful­ly bonkers space opera is a prime exam­ple of gid­dy­ing, uncom­pro­mis­ing Hol­ly­wood cinema.