By David Cox

David reviews "The Fifth Element", a film by Luc Besson with Art Direction by Mobius, Columbia Pictures 1997.

Layer Upon Layer

Luc Besson's "The Fifth Element" seems to be made on location. The French call it "Future Prox" - near future. It's a place very much a part of the popular French imagination, illustrated by its passion for comics such as Rank Xerox, and Mobius' legendary "Metal Hurlant" (Heavy Metal) magazine. Mobius' style, much referred to in the work of Ridley Scott, ("Alien", "Blade Runner") is more often than not toned down in its baroque complexity - countless layers of elevated streets to cities, unfathomable scale of buildings and technology, multi-layered cities teeming with people like ants.

Not so in "The Fifth Element". Digital effects have enabled the producers to unplug all the stops in this unbelievably dense film - which investigates the themes of good versus evil and a battle of cosmic proportions for possession of four stones representing the elements - fire, earth, water and wind. The fifth element turns out to be life, represented by the film's central "La Femme Nikita" style cyberbabe. The film has its tongue placed firmly in its cheek, which is a blessing because playing this film straight would never have made it work. In parts, the camp appears a bit forced, and having the ordinarily superb Gary Oldman do a fake Southern drawl, was definitely a bad move in my book. The camp is in the same league as "Batman Returns" - aggressive, sudden, bright in yer face and digitally enhanced.

Mixmaster Flash

What I enjoy most about the film is its design sensibility. There is a very Eurocentric aesthetic of joyful and meticulous embrace of old with the new - that particularly late 20th Century postmodern design feel first investigated in "Max Headroom - 20 minutes into the Future" (one of William Gibson's favourite films) and "Blade Runner". It's the idea of deliberately confusing historical periods and making different design principles forcefully, madly coexist. For instance, in 1982 the "Blade Runner" look was chic deco/modernist 1940s.

In "Blade Runner", Los Angeles was shown as Dark Manhattan - not sparse, bright, foggy and spread out as LA actually is, but towering and dark, like Gotham City. It was the Radiant City of the 1930s film "The Shape of Things to Come" immersed in absolute filth and moral decay. "The Fifth Element" looks and sounds like New York. The film's audio department have carefully perfected the eerie sound of NYPD cop car sirens reverberating off buildings. A kind of ubiquitous chirping throughout the city. Digital sound playback systems these days lets them do that: position sound in 3D cinema "real estate" to reproduce the sonic ambience of contemporary already_familiar_places like NYC 1997.

In the aforementioned British "Max Headroom" pilot, the aesthetic was incredibly ahead of its time. It was an earlier brand of post apocalyptic film design, but infinitely faster paced, *extremely* camp and self-deprecating. "The Fifth Element" look is harshly lit, dazzling sparkly accelerated techno/rave, mixed with lofty ponderous 18th Century dandyism. The mix is a kind of New Romantic sad fast bright spaced out look for the last of the nineties..

The third millennium's fashion sense balls-out *funky*. The film's costumes look like they were created in Paris fashion houses just last week. Some of the outfits and sets borrow strongly from David Lynch's "Dune" - especially the use of neo classical elements in spacecraft interior design.

The opera house aboard the paradise luxury liner was shot on location. One character actually introduces it to us as an exact replica of the Paris Opera - the joke being of course that being on location it's probably one of the few scenes in the film *not* filmed in an elaborate megabuck spinout set.

Virtuous Reality

Computers, it can be safely said, enable filmmakers to visually create anything, which can be imagined. Effects such as natural lighting, texture mapping and 3D design enable anything at all to be made and animated. Cars can be made to float and fly - in fact it is probably easier to show a car flying in a computer than it is to show it convincingly rolling along the ground. And "The Fifth Element" immerses us - drowns us in a city which has sped up to a rate which baffles us as 1990s New York would baffle our great grandparents. Camera moves can be mimicked with breath taking accuracy, and the camera motion of real cameras filming real events can be used to guide virtual cameras in exactly the same way.

Watch Me, I'm Expensive

I've got friends who are into digital special effects in a big way who have seen this move five times already. I'm not sure I'm ready for that kind of audiovisual assault yet, but when the video comes out, the rewind and pause button will be put to damn good use. You see, my SPFX friend tells me earnestly, "it costs *money* to pay Californians to animate computer generated cars, cities and spacecraft. A lot of money".

In some ways, thinking about "The Fith Element's" alleged 70 million-dollar production costs makes me wince - one wonders if films can be made in America any more unless they guarantee box office success.

William Gibson and Robert Longo were, according to some accounts, simply forbidden by the Hollywood system from spending anything less than 40 million on "Johnny Mnemonic", when all they wanted was about 10 million to do a kind of latter day "Alphaville". In that film, Jean Luc Godard had his main character drive around the present day (early 1960s) Paris as if it were some future city in some future time. In other words, why *bother* going to the trouble of showing the entire computer generated (expensive) city, when the themes are all that matter? But try swinging that idea past it would seem most of the suits in La La Land: Block buster or nothing. No in betweens. Mass market or no market. And what a pity it is, really. When better films come often from an imperative to well, simply make better films...

Digital cinema, like the once upon a time costly and rare sound film is rapidly becoming a normal, commonplace thing. The beachhead digital effects "Siliwood" (Silicon Valley meets Hollywood) films like "Terminator 2", "Jurassic Park", "True Lies" etc. have laid the ground for films like the "Fifth Element", drawing fully upon the technical and aesthetic precedentsof earlier cyberpunk cinema as cultural reference points. Fifteen years after its release, the commercially unsuccessful "Blade Runner" is far away enough in time from us now to be a historical marker, just as once "Citizen Kane" was considered a masterpiece twenty years after its completion. "Blade Runner" is definitely the masthead filmic cultural hub around which "The Fifth Element" swings, but the whole film is basically location based entertainment for people in my age bracket (34) of "spot the sci fi blockbuster reference".

Digital Body Corporate Urban Fleshmeat

The future New York of the film appears fleetingly, through mainly chase sequences, where the viewer sees through the eyes of people being chased. The now familiar motif of flying cars enable chases to happen in full surround sound 3 dimensions - cars can hover, or dive directly up or down. Traffic resembles that in "Back to the Future Part 2" where "Jetsons" style, hover cars (even styled to resemble 30s deco ideas of future cars) keep to their aerial lanes. Traffic in 300 years from now has become a kind of bloodstream - a 3D circulatory system. Indeed one of the films' most impressive sequences is that where a whole human figure is assembled from a DNA sample extracted from a creature, which has crash-landed on the moon. A kind of medical operating table extends tiny arms to literally build up a figure from nothing, rapidly adding flesh to a skeleton like dicing beef in reverse. The sections, which constitute the figure, are slices, resembling those which were scanned off the condemned man, later posted on the Internet and released on CD-ROM as the ghoulish, but groundbreaking Visible Human" project.

Humanity, this sequence seems to propose, has by means of computers totally lost its physical origins and bearings. But instead of allowing this situation to be a major hindrance, 300 years hence society has reversed this potentially major ethical/technical dilemma to manufacture its population from both synthetic materials and pure information. People know how to construct clones as if making McBurgers. Like synthespian avatar Jurassic era dinosaurs in contemporary Hollywood, future real characters are simply made to order.

Socialcitybody3D

The physicality of the body is an extension of the city-state; whose exponential rate of development through technology has made this high-speed fast food Frankensteinian blend of humanity a possibility.

The rapid flow of floating cars in the film's version of future Manhattan resembles a circulatory system. Mirrored in the city's speed is the rapid pace of dexterous robot fingers, which construct the human form (described by them all as "perfect" - neo futurism), from information and artificial tissue alone. The flying cars behave like earnest corpuscles flying around the body. The city and body are one. Hence the central character can leap off a building and crash into a car and nothing goes wrong - it's just one "body" floating through another "body" and melding with other "bodies". Digital hybridisation of landscape with character. Setting with subject.

Stop Shooting I'm Getting into This!

I wished in many ways the film had stopped being a chase movie long enough to ponder this fascinating world of the "Fifth Element". Having set the scene, the film forces the viewer only to speed through it. I'd be interested to know if the script changed much during the production and what role storyboards played. If "Fifth Element" is techno hardcore, I want the ambient mix.

Offering the viewer a kind of a la cart theme park ride through the future, "The Fifth Element" reminded me an awful lot of the Paul Verhoeven megamovie "Total Recall". Like that film, the action often tended to get in the way of the story. Just as soon as you were starting to get into the yarn, someone pulls out a gun and blasts everything in sight. Then inevitably a huge chase ensues, and so we're back to theme park ride land again. You sometimes want the ride to stop long enough to enjoy the view.

Check out the "Fifth Element", but be sure to laugh at its often very stupid jokes, in order to better enjoy the spectacle of a future which is all too familiar - our very own postmodern, accelerated, full on techno hardcore urban digital speedfreak Xstatic western capitalist media driven cybercity of right here, right now.

The Fifth Element
www.spe.sony.com/Pictures/SonyMovies/movies/Fifth/

The Fifth Element Soundtrack
www.movietunes.com/soundtracks/1997/fifthelement/

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