This hopelessly sentimental reveal isn’t an empty one, though these characters don’t just fall in love because that’s what happens at the end of movies. But the film’s ultimate message is that the fifth element is really love: Near the end, it turns out that Korben’s declaration of his love for Leeloo, and hers for him, allows her to activate her celestial powers in the movie’s climax. Stylishness aside, The Fifth Element does have a plot of sorts: Korben is on a quest to unite the four “elements” (fire, earth, water, and air) with a fifth, Leeloo-a humanoid woman possessed of an inherent goodness that she can use to fight an invading evil. But beneath the surface, The Fifth Element is a highly underrated piece of subversive Hollywood cinema. Besson, the French director who pioneered the stylish cinema du look of France’s 1980s, likes to use grand imagery to present his often simplistic narratives. Valerian, opening in theaters this week, is already drawing the same kind of polarized reaction The Fifth Element got 20 years ago, with critics praising its visual boldness while expressing, at best, a little confusion about its dialogue and storytelling choices. Besson takes an all-American cowboy hero, a trope as old as the Flash Gordon sci-fi films he’s aping, and uses not violence, but art, to help teach Korben a larger lesson about the importance of other people in his life. This internal shift is a bigger deal than any of The Fifth Element’s action sequences-a dramatic device that helps distinguish Besson from his genre-director peers, and that resurfaces in his new film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. But the genius of her scene is that her voice prompts a genuine emotional change in the film’s maverick male protagonist, nudging him from being a hard-edged renegade into something much more openhearted. But for a second, the movie grinds to a halt, letting Korben take in the extraterrestrial songstress’s solo with tears in his eyes.ĭiva Plavalaguna is one of The Fifth Element’s many MacGuffins-it turns out she has the stones in her possession, and she hands them over to Korben after a wild shootout in the venue. Besson’s film has, up until now, been a relentless blitz of action, as Korben follows the mysterious Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) across the galaxy to help retrieve mystical stones that will help her save the world from a great, encroaching evil. That set piece comes in the middle of the film as Willis’s character, Korben Dallas, a gun-wielding space cowboy with spiked, peroxide-blonde hair, takes in a show by the blue alien singer Diva Plavalaguna (Maïwenn). But not many blockbusters would let its male star weep at a musical performance. In budget, in scale, and in casting, The Fifth Element feels like any other big Hollywood sci-fi movie, featuring popular English-speaking actors running around a high-concept world, complete with lavish sets and CGI effects. It’s that Bruce Willis cries at the opera. It isn’t the bizarre Southern twang of the Hitler haircut-sporting villain Zorg (Gary Oldman), nor is it Chris Tucker’s performance as an intergalactic sex symbol who hosts a radio show. From the 3:15 mark, it's nothing but goosebumps and the level of anticipation that rivals a bottle of champagne that's dangerously close to exploding.The most radical element of Luc Besson’s 1997 space opera The Fifth Element is not the absurdly opulent future-costumes designed by Jean Paul Gaultier. It doesn't matter that Zhang's performance was recorded five months ago, because it's worth seeing and hearing. She's considered one of the biggest pop stars in China, has already been featured on Oprah, and it's easy to see why in the video below. The Chinese singer Jane Zhang, however, has done the impossible. In order to record the song for the film, Mula had to sing the notes individually, at which point they were digitally combined into one track. But in order to successfully change between long and thin to short and thick, you'd need a lot more time than Serra had allowed for with his composition. At higher tones, they expand and become long and thin at deeper ones, they become short and thicker. The distance between the two keys makes it impossible to alternate between the two so quickly, and the same rule applies to human vocal chords. This limitation can be explained like this: Imagine telling a pianist they'd have to play with only one of their hands, and they'd have to switch between the highest and lowest notes in the blink of an eye. Instead, Mula told him that it wasn't humanly possibly to hit some of the notes, because a human voice couldn't change so quickly between them. As Eric Serra, the composer of the film, explained during an interview that the soprano they'd hired to record the song, Inva Mula, was supposed to have smiled when Serra showed her the notes for the Diva Dance.
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