Film

The Fifth Element

Name: The Fifth Element
Genre: Science Fiction, Action, Adventure
Released: 1997
Cast: Bruce Willis, Milla Jovovich, Gary Oldman, Ian Holm, Chris Tucker

Luc Besson's 1997 space opera is pure sugar-rush spectacle: a cosmic taxi-driver-saves-the-world plot dressed in Jean-Paul Gaultier couture, orange-haired Milla Jovovich, and Chris Tucker turned up to eleven. It's loud, ridiculous, gorgeous and completely unembarrassed about any of it. Watch it for the production design and the sheer joy of a blockbuster that refuses to take itself seriously for even one second.

TMDb rating

7.6

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Kurt Russell at his most gloriously overconfident in a kung-fu monster mash-up that never once winks — it just commits, hard, to its own nonsense.

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Something you would not have found on your own.

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Besson again, decades later, throwing even more money at the same comic-book impulses — a thousand-species city, another luminous alien heroine, wall-to-wall imagination.

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Verhoeven's other 1997 sci-fi satire, gleefully over-the-top and gorier, mocking the genre while fully indulging in it.

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Turn-of-the-millennium sci-fi cool with a chosen-one plot and iconic style, proving the late-90s were obsessed with humanity's last line of defence.

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The godmother of glam space camp — Jane Fonda in increasingly absurd costumes, saving the galaxy with sincerity and zero self-consciousness.

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Heavy Metal1981

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But Silent, slow by modern standards, and demands patience Fifth Element never asks of you.