Hacker Cinema
The Fifth Element
Le Cinquième Élément
1997 · Film · 126 min
Directed by Luc Besson
Science FictionActionAdventure
In 2257, a taxi driver is unintentionally given the task of saving a young girl who is part of the key that will ensure the survival of humanity.
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90 comments on Hacker News
Most "space opera" folks recognize, are just a close scene-by-scene copy of a classic foreign film title.
"The Hidden Fortress" (Akira Kurosawa, 1960)
https://archive.org/details/the-hidden-fortress
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Fortress
Luc Besson and Patrice Ledoux structured The Fifth Element plot very differently due to their culture. Perhaps one may also find something unique in the classics for your own enjoyment, or continue to choose to be upset with mundane facts. Goodbye =3
It was the HQ of French company, Alstom's French headquarters is located in Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine, near Paris, at 48 rue Albert Dhalenne, 93400 Saint-Ouen, France. The display shows original props from Luc Besson’s 1997 movie The Fifth Element — including Korben Dallas’s famous yellow flying taxi and the blue-and-silver NYPD police car. Alstom keeps these pieces on display as a fun tribute to their shared focus on city mobility.
Not to mention them getting together for the Fifth Element led to the Joan of Arc movie they did together afterwards (or at least contributed).
That's a pretty wild take, but ok. I think you really have to be digging deep and "looking for trouble" to take issue with a fun and relatively wholesome movie like Fifth Element.
I thought slightly less of the casting for Fifth Element after I learned about the "Born Sexy Yesterday" thing in conjunction with Luc Besson's personal life. Same with Leon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Sexy_Yesterday
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0thpEyEwi80
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Besson#Personal_life
While I enjoyed watching the movies, I feel like I would have to point out this dynamic if I were to show the movie to my kids.
If you enjoyed the Fifth Element absolutely watch Jodorowsky's Dune
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935156/
On the cover it's a story about the failed production of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune script but the deeper story was the aggregation of an unbelievably talented pool of visual artists including Jean "Moebius" Giraud (mentioned as central artist in 5th element), H.R. Giger, Chris Foss, Salvador Dali, & Dan O'Bannon.
That group would go on to centrally influence the visual style of a huge body of science fiction work including Alien, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Star Wars, The Matrix, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc etc.
The art and creativity on display in the film is absolutely sonic.
Kind of like the original PayPal mafia!
Fifth Element is pretty much Besson doing Valerian before he was able to get funding for Valerian, so we kinda did get a spiritual sequel of sorts.
Unfortunately, while I've grown to like the Valerian movie, when compared to Fifth Element it would seem that Besson should have been given a far tighter budget for Valerian rather than the apparent near free reign he got.
The Fifth Element and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets are widely considered to share a thematic and stylistic universe, with similar aesthetic influences. There are shared elements (ha!) and aesthetics, with Valerian even featuring a shop called "Korbens" as an easter egg to The Fifth Element.
Unfortunately the movie doesn't do it for me, the 90s were a better time.
Once CGI became good storytelling and creativity took a backseat in Hollywood.
I'm just here to share my love for this film. I'm a big movie fan. I've been watching the Fifth Element since high school, and I've only grown to appreciate it more and more as a film as I get older.
It's so full of life, creativity, color, humor, and themes we can all relate to (purpose, love, loss, etc).
This is peek Bruce Willis, and the movie is filled with other exceptional actors including Gary Oldman and Ian Holm. Milla Jovovich is extremely entertaining to watch as a sort fish-out-of-water, and I know Chris Tucker's character here isn't for everyone but in my opinion it's right on-brand for the film. Cracks me up every time for decades.
Mostly the effects have aged really well. That's generally thanks to heavy use of practical effects, as this article highlights.
I often get sad that this is becoming a lost art. Great filmmakers with big budgets are still doing this type of practical effects work (Nolan [Interstellar], Villeneuve [Dune]), but I think eventually it will be lost in time.
I have fond memories of the Fifth Element, as one of my first PG-13 movies at the cinema that I was allowed to see as a 9-10 year old.
Looking back, the whole story gives a different futuristic feel to the usual gloomy polluted dystopian earths, and feels a bit, "near-future".
Seeing hover cars getting drive through McDonalds will forever be a future hope for me (my inner 10 year old self)
Adam Savage covered the Mondoshawan props on his channel last year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf5dPrmBvwE
It was a fun film, but Chris Tucker broke the pacing too many times for a general audience. Even now on rottentomatoes his role still distracts focus from the character arcs.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fifth_element
Was a cult classic for sure, but nowhere near Blade Runner as a film. =3
I recently watched A League of Their Own and Die Hard. In my opinion, these movies are just categorically different from what's being made today, are still totally compelling start to finish, and really capture the magic and the high art of the golden age of cinema. I truly believe movies were Just Better 30-40 years ago.
That was the era of "every second counts." Every second has meaning and purpose and adds something to the narrative. The Fifth Element is another good example, and almost 30 years old. Now in the age of binging, where a 2 hour plot is stretched into 17 hours of TV, there is SO much filler and downtime and it's honestly just offensive in comparison.
I kind of enjoyed Pluribus, I liked the concept and what they did with it, but there's way too much forgettable filler that dilutes it into a slog. The movies I mentioned are (again, IMO) absolutely gripping and just lean and mean storytelling vehicles. Like it kind of reminded me that watching a movie wasn't just something you did leisurely while doing other things.
There’s also a lot of artistic creepers, which predate the internet but the internet shone a light on their creepiness.
I would, for instance, watch The Ninth Gate a couple times a year if Polanski hadn’t directed it, or had directed it post jail instead of hiding from justice for 25 years. Instead I watch it about twice a decade. Luke Beson is almost as problematic, and I have a hard time reconciling just how brilliant Gary Oldman is as Stansfield with how creepy the overall tone is, especially the European cut. I enjoyed that movie when I was young and had seen the American version. Trying to show it to other people (especially the Leon version) and seeing their less enthusiastic reactions made me see the balance of that story less affectionately. As well as seeing it through the lens of an adult responsible for children instead of being the child. Now I watch The Fifth Element and that’s about it.
It's up there with Waterworld and The Fifth Element, in that they're un-ironically some of my favorite films.
It reminds me of the movie The Fifth Element with all the company advertising everywhere, seemingly tied into government operations.
1997 was an absolutely phenomenal year for movies. Life Is Beautiful, Boogie Nights, Jackie Brown, Titanic, Donnie Brasco, The Fifth Element, Good Will Hunting, As Good as It Gets, Austin Powers International Man of Mystery, Gattaca, LA Confidential, Men in Black, Liar Liar, Amistad, The Game, Con Air, Contact.
There was a lot to do in 1997, just not as much to do without leaving home. We went to movies because they were affordable and great movies were being released.
Also, that was the era where new multiplex theaters were being built with great sound systems, so it was worth going to a theater for the high-quality experience. While quality consumer electronics are more readily available today than ever before, I feel like the vast majority today only watch media with headphones, TV speakers, or maybe a 2.1 stereo+sub setup.
There's a single scene in the film- when the ship takes off and you see New York hundreds of years in the future- that has more detail and plot potential in it than nearly any other movie I've seen. https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/96xs5h/in_the_fifth_element_manhattan_the_statue_of/
To present an opposite viewpoint, I try to only engage with media I suspect future me will be able to revisit and pull enjoyment out of at least once. I rarely actually do so, but I've found it to be a remarkably effective quality filter.
It's also a genre independent quality metric. That's not to be underplayed. Some examples of films that successfully passed it for me: Casablanca; Portrait of a Lady on Fire; Hereditary; Under the Skin; My Neighbor Totoro; The Fifth Element. I'm pretty sure most people would agree at least half of these movies are good.
It turns out most of the things I consider worth revisiting at least once are also things other people would consider that way. So for me a Rewatchability rating is a positive signal.
Fifth element is a great movie. I was just thinking about watching that again.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
Original Star Wars trilogy. Lord of the Rings American Psycho Total Recall (1990) Blade Runner Love Actually The Fifth Element Unbreakable Pulp Fiction Four Weddings and a Funeral Guardians of the Galaxy X-Men X-Men the Last Stand Showing my age here, but I started to lose interest in movies after the 2000s. No I do not want to watch a remake of [Blade Runner, X-Men, etc...]. Also X-Men was great, but my interest didn't stretch to Captain America and Iron Man, so the MCU was a loss for me.
Mostly, I will watch a movie a second or third time if I am tired and it's on TV and cannot sleep. So there is only a small intersection of films that I have watched multiple times and would admit to watching even once.
So excluding those, from most to least (probably).
- elf
- the Bourne identity
- groundhog day
- ronin
- Willie Wonka (the original)
- the fifth element
- ghost dog (any Jim Jarmusch)
- the blues brothers
- singin' in the rain
- crouching tiger, hidden dragon
- my friend totoro
I am probably leaving out quite a few, but all these films I have seen enough times to reconstruct in my head, scene by scene.
I rarely re-watch movies, and will fall asleep if I try, but I can always watch The Fifth Element.
Or The Fifth Element Movie?
> give us all tranquilizers as we board, and stack us on top of each other like firewood.
In the movie The Fifth Element, that is almost exactly what happens to passengers on an interstellar trip. [0] The flight attendant announces they will be using "sleep regulators", where a button on each passenger-pod can instantly make the occupant unconscious.
P.S.: The pods would probably be even smaller if nobody had to care about the opinions of set-designers and actors and camera-crew. :p
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UENRVfdnGxs
The 90s with its apolitical cinema like Saving private Ryan or Forrest gump that certainly are not pro american propaganda or other great movies like the Matrix that do not denounce late stage capitalism as soul crushing and has no themes that could be interpreted about taking red pills and feeling more like yourself.
The 90s had a different context sure, capitalism was peaking, we didn't have the crushing reality of the post 2008 world, or the crazy chest bumping Murica militarism of the post 9/11 era. But the 2000s scare, the internet fear, the office jobs being boring/grey and soulless. The slight fear of science and progress (see Jurassic park, gattaca, fifth element), the work culture being inhumane and dehumanising (matrix, office space, clerks, american beauty), the same happened in music with grunge being one of the main genres of the decades.
All of this art was made in the backdrop of probably the most optimistic period of time, Disney had a renaissance, america absolute cleared the floor in the first gulf war, the stock market had an impossible never ending rise, pop music was happier than ever and fashion was in the most sexy, thin, in your face hotness ever.
If you only want to enjoy the 90s happiness without seeing the fact tons of counter art was being made and that our current cyniscim isn't only a product of the post 2008 economic stagnation but also comes from the seeds that were planted at the height of the cultural hedonism of the 90s then you are just straight ignoring some of the biggest hits of that decade.
I saw this in popular mechanics 30 years ago I swear to god. The movie The Fifth Element even parodies this with a “spy cockroach”.
> They made a mistake and got too greedy and make a subscription I barely paid attention to something that got too expensive...
That's the thing, in the past I I'd go months without watching anything on Netflix yet still pay them for it, so they were essentially getting a free $8 a month (or whatever) off me during that time.
Now the prices have gone up so much it doesn't make sense to keep subscribed for something I'm barely using, just so I can easily watch a single show that interests me once every three months or so.
The only streaming service that has makes some sense for me to pay for right now is Youtube's, since that's my goto for videos anyway, and it's nice not to have ads for those.
Additionally they also have a bunch of great older movies free to watch movies on Youtube, probably a better selection (of movies I care about) than Netflix right now (saw/rewatched Train to Busan, Little Shop of Horrors, Ghostbusters, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Tropic Thunder, Fifth Element, Big Trouble in Little China, Dr. Strangelove, 12 Angry Men, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, The Truman Show, Air Force One, Dirty Work, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It recently).
> films from the 80s like BR
There's a lot of time between 1980 and now, but I think The Fifth Element (1997) maybe a useful data point when it comes to little details in sci-fi.
For example, when Dallas is at home having a cigarette, and the "filter" portion is bigger than the rest of it.
That was my first thought too: all those sleek (or less sleek, as in The Fifth Element) anti-gravity flying cars from sci-fi films just became a little less probable...
There's a lot of great picks here, such as Gattaca, Man from Earth, Contact, The Matrix, Wall-E, Children of Men, The Fifth Element, 12 Monkeys. I would add Truman Show.
Depending on the individual and their patience, Primer (2004) might also be a great fit. The pace is a bid subdued but thematically, it's mind bending. I don't think it includes anything particularly awkward as an early scifi movie to watch together with your own child. I would probably start with one of the spectacles from the above picks, though.
I get the sense that you would like some adult themes, but not too slow?
Top of my mind (and in no specific order) would be:
- Dark City
- The Thirteenth Floor
- City of the Lost Children
- Tron (original and maybe new one)
- Interstellar
- Inception
- A Clockwork Orange
- Her (very relevant to our times)
- Dune (2021 version)
- Brazil
- The Martian
- Children of Men
- Edge of Tomorrow (most like Marvelverse on this list but still very good)
- Moon
- Twelve Monkeys
- Upgrade
- The Fifth Element
- Contact
- Okja
- District 9
- Predestination (very relevant to our times)
- Serenity (but might need some prep from the tv show before watching)
- World on a Wire
- The Abyss
- Minority Report (very relevant in our times)
- The Fly
- Videodrome
- Equilibrium
- Strange Days
- The Andromeda Strain (relevant after Covid)
- eXistenZ (trippy but I loved it when it came out and was only around your sons age)
- In Time (interesting class dynamics on display)
- Enemy Mine
- Franklyn (some interesting takes on mental illness)
- The Arrival
I haven't seen these mentioned yet: Galaxy Quest, The Fifth Element, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Oblivion, Tron: Legacy, Mission to Mars, Pacific Rim, Bicentennial Man, Alita: Battle Angel (some of these may be PG-13)
Treasure Planet and Titan A.E. are also good animated movies, although Treasure Planet is more science-fantasy.
I'd also second Back to the Future, Contact, Interstellar, Gattaca, October Sky
Brazil, The man from Earth, Moon, The fountain, Ad Astra, Donnie Darko, Ender's Game, Edge of tomorrow, Solaris (the old one), Westworld (70s), Metropolis (the japanese anime), Dark Star (trippy, 70s, great end), Firefly series and Serenity movie, Attack the block, Fifth Element, planet of the apes (the old one), ex machina, children of men
Zorg-onomics?
"Excuse me, sir. The council is worried about the economy heating up. They wondered if it'd be possible to fire 500000. Maybe from one of the smaller companies where no one would notice..."
"Fire one million".
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119116/
I keep thinking I should rewatch this. I was pretty young. Even to me it seemed camp, but not bad camp. I dunno, it had a dirty future Fifth Element vibe (a latter but more noted movie). Which is a movie I didnt really like, thought was too silly/camp at first. But grew into.
I first saw it around 1998 I think, in my early teens, and it made the same impression on me. So many of the ideas were amazing! It was also around this time I saw Terminator 2, RoboCop and The Fifth Element for the first time also. And then another few years later when my english teacher in secondary school had us watch the Matrix on VHS. It wasn't until I watched it in my own time I appreciated it. So many good films, rose tinted glasses!
If you've ever seen the movie The Fifth Element (1997), there is a flying car chase scene. In the scene there are many levels of aerial streets, very tall buildings, and the ability to fly into a building many stories above ground.
The interesting thing about Blade Runner and almost all modern sci-fi and cyberpunk is that they all took their influence from one single comic, The Long Tomorrow, by Dan O'Bannon and Jean Giraud (aka Moebius).
Dan and Moebius were working on Jodorowsky's Dune. During a slow period, Dan was bored and started drawing a comic. Moebius saw this and offered to rework it a bit. Their collab appeared in Heavy Metal (Metal hurlant) magazine. Ridley Scott used this comic as visual inspiration for Blade Runner. William Gibson even credits this comic for Neuromancer. Other movies influenced by this comic, or the art of Moebius include Tron, Heavy Metal (based on the magazine comics), The Fifth Element, and The Abyss. And, of course, pretty much everything else that came later such as The Matrix or video games like Deus Ex.
It's crazy to think about all the what-ifs with Jodorowsky's Dune. If he did not bring Dan and Moebius together, we wouldn't have Blade Runner (or a vastly different one). If Dune didn't fall apart, Dan wouldn't have gone and written Alien. If Alien didn't happen, Ridley Scott may not have known about Dan O'Bannon or Moebius, and never have done Blade Runner.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was also influenced by Moebius, according to Miyazaki. Look at Azrach (again, Metal hurlant magazine) and the similarities are obvious. The French were really ahead in illustration and animation at one point, and don't often get the credit they deserve. Go and look at what René Laloux was doing with Fantastic Planet, Time Masters, or his short films. Some of this stuff still blows my mind.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/TheFifthElement
http://theabsolutemag.com/22276/books/the-incal-is-the-comic-book-predecessor-to-the-fifth-element/ (graphic novel)
He does meet and fight John at the end, who I was referring to. But in every episode prior they never actually meet. At the police station he is juuust out of view and Frank is leaning in his chair to try and see him. At some other point they have a literal fire fight with approximate knowledge of where the other is but no visibility so they’re just blind firing through wall. Maybe some other choice moments.
It’s a very different choice than Fifth Element where their experiences are tangential to each other. The punisher guys are in active conflict, they just never get the opportunity to actually see each other face to face. Until the end. They go to some length with the camera shots to convey this.
Idk, I thought it was cool. But ultimately not capitalized on.
The Fifth Element had amazing world building and had an irreverent and playful tone that a lot of people found really fun. Those things obviously didn't resonate with you, but that doesn't mean the film is tripe. That would insinuate that the film makers failed, when in fact they succeeded at exactly what they were trying to do.
It’s not a movie for deep plot, and it’s lacking in writing, which would normally ruin a movie for me. But gosh, the setting. It feels lived in. The future — its culture, its fashion, its transportation — it all feels bewildering in a way that the real future would be to us. It doesn’t bother to explain any of it either, because everyone in the future knows it. The audience is stuck there with Leeloo, having learned the word “multipass”.
In a way it was a lot like my first time watching Spirited Away (a far better film) knowing next to nothing about Japanese culture. Everything about it seemed new and fantastical and like a wholly new setting. I can’t recapture that feeling now that I know a lot more Japanese culture, but The Fifth Element can retain that sense of a real but truly alien place and culture.
Can anyone enlighten me? I'd say before I gave up with Film, that Fifth Element was the deepest tripe. I can't say for sure, but I believe that after Terminator 2 and Jurassic park there was garbage for a few years, and the Fifth Element was one of the junctions that I took towards never watching a movie again.
Edit: Bit of an artistic flair on these responses. It was shit but it was French, it was shit but it was meant to be... etc
Amusingly I think most of that is not actually CGI (as we now define it).
They had a giant warehouse with a toy NYC that they flew a camera through with little models... pretty nuts given how movies are made now.
The making of Fifth Element is a pretty great watch.
Some backstory: Luc Besson directed "The Professional" (1994). His second wife was Maïwenn Le Besco, who was the model, but not the voice, for the Diva in "The Fifth Element" (1997), also directed by Besson. Maïwenn and Besson started dating when she was 15 and he was 31, they were married in 1992 when she was 16, and she had his child in January 1993. She later claimed that their relationship inspired "The Professional." They divorced in 1997 after Besson, 38, became involved with and then married "The Fifth Element" star Milla Jovovich, 21. Later in 2018 Besson was accused of rape by several women, though he denied the accusations and they were never proven in court.
I'm not sure whether the fact that the director of a movie with a pedophilic subtext was himself involved in an only-slightly-less pedophilic relationship in real life makes the movie itself less ethical to make or to watch, though it certainly doesn't make it any better. Maybe I'm saying that I'm skeptical that a creator who does some immoral thing can make a creation about that same thing with the context and discretion necessary not to glorify it.
The only thing I pirate is movies / tv shows ... and it's extremely simple: because it's not humanly possible to purchase them digitally.
Games: yes. Music: yes. Books: yes. Magazines: yes. What happened to tv and film? Where are you all?
Let's say I want to purchase The Fifth Element and throw it on my plex server so I can watch it on vacation out of the country? How can I do that? The answer is simple: you cannot. So I pirate it. And enjoy watching it. If the industry WOULD provide me with some way to purchase The Fifth Element, get a high quality mkv or mp4 or whatever download of it, I would do it in an instant.
I think two things are going on, everyone remembers movies they watched as a kid/teen and thinks they where unusually good. It’s not that there was a golden age of movies, it’s that you personally had seen fewer movies.
That said, the ratio of original movies to sequels/franchises changed. Fast forward 20 years from Star Wars to 1997 and sure yet another Titanic, Jurassic Park 2, and a James Bond film but also, Men in Black, The Fifth Element, Liar Liar, As Good as It Gets etc so still mostly original movies.
But fast forward to 2017 and the top 10 movies included: Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Harry Potter 5, Spider-Man 3, Shrek 3, National Treasure 2, The Simpsons Movie, and Transformers. I Am Legend based on a book and 300 based on a comic. So only Ratatouille was actually new.
"The Big Blue" is a timeless masterpiece and one of my favorite films of all time. The ethereal photography and soundtrack create an otherworldly vibe without veering too far into Lynchian surrealism. Luc Besson is probably better-known for his later action films ("The Professional", "The Fifth Element", etc) but "The Big Blue" is his magnum opus IMHO.
Alien, The Matrix, 12 Monkeys, Terminator, Fight Club, The Fifth Element, The Sixth Sense, Back to the Future, eXistenZ, Gattaca, The Arrival, 2001 space Odissey, the Shining, Trainspotting, Ground Hog day, Dune, Dark city, Tron, Demolition man, Total Recall, Robocop, The city of lost children...
Nuanced, scify, full of smart details or mind bending films are not new.
In fact, it's really hard to innovate now, because so much as already being covered.
Not as good as The Fifth Element, but I liked it a lot.
I don't understand why it gets so much hate. All movies have parts that are well done and parts that I would have done differently.
Another point to consider is that many 4K 35mm movies, are actually upscaled from 1080p or 2K scans.
Here's a good list to check whether a film is real 4K or not.
https://www.digiraw.com/DVD-4K-Bluray-ripping-service/4K-UHD-ripping-service/the-real-or-fake-4K-list/
I've now remembered that the X-Men films from 20 years ago did look pretty good in 4K HDR. And apparently they are "real 4K". Also the 4K remaster of The Fifth Element.
Yes, and this is why this is not happening anytime soon, and thus (imho) lvl3 won't happen anytime soon.
What comes to mind is the 'Fifth Element' movie, scene when Bruce Willis tampers with the electronics of this cab when police is chasing him, and he's burning the little 'points' he has left.
Perhaps an early implementation could be limited in specific parts (specific highways, when you are 'woken up' before the entry & exit' and the car takes over for the long stretch. A combination of transponders, sensors, magnetic beacons/'drivers' on the asphalt, GPS, radio antennas (kinda like Android/Google maps use for location).
I tend to NOT buy something until proven to work. Musk is a media/marketing freak. He will tell whatever he has to, to serve his business interest. It's down to us to jump the bandwagon, OR wait calmly until the 'thing' is actually produced, tested, proven.
That's fair; I was tempted to say that The Fifth Element also a little bit prefigured "hopepunk", in that it is, in spite of everything, a love story with a happy ending. Brazil could maybe almost be considered the "black mirror" version of the same story, if you squint really hard at least.
In any case, I haven't watched either film in far too long. I should really remedy that soon!
It's wild that Douglas Adams' and Infocom's Bureaucracy, an interactive fiction published in 1987, had precisely this sort of thing as more or less its whole subject matter. It's not quite exact to what we see today, of course; for one thing, it traffics in paper forms and mail-in cards, rather than web forms and obstructionist live chats. But its juxtaposition of saccharine platitudes and hostile apathy feels no less evergreen for the intervening decades.
You're right that the cyberpunk genre lacks a sufficient dose of this kind of absurdity. I think that derives in large part from its original popularizers - I'm thinking here of Gibson and Stephenson, in particular - being in such deadly earnest about everything. Gibson especially, being a literary author trafficking in genre, I think could fairly be blamed for this; Stephenson at least attempted a sense of humor in his most significant work, and sometimes even succeeded, but in his case I think it's more a flaw of worldbuilding in that the mechanisms of transition from the America of his present, to the micro-balkanized future he depicted, were insufficiently fleshed out and thus failed to capture the mounting absurdity of daily life that any such transition I think necessarily entails.
Perhaps that's a touch presentist of me, in the case of Snow Crash at least; after all, it was written in far less absurd days than these. Nonetheless, I think most who've followed have felt to some degree bound to emulate - not all, though; for example, the brilliant cyberpunk film The Fifth Element does spend deliberate effort to successfully, if briefly, depict the absurdity of life in such a dispensation.
Would that more works in the genre did the same, and in general that they would more broadly update their extrapolation of possible futures to look ahead from today, instead of from thirty or forty years ago. But that kind of work is very hard, so maybe it's not too much a surprise to see it done so rarely.
His performance in _The Sweet Hereafter_ was a thing to behold in an overall gutting movie. At the other end of the spectrum, _Fifth Element_ came out the very same year. Now that’s range.
The Fifth Element is one of the few movies where, back when cable was a thing, when it was on "TV" you could watch it no matter where you started. It's weirdly charming, in all of it's absurdity.
> My only apprehension is that the director will try to relieve the absurdity by making it comedic, when the best way to handle it is to just have it be openly ridiculous without apologizing for it.
The Fifth Element did this _excellently_, and yet there hasn't been a similarly themed movie since AFAIK.
Movies for the large audience must always entertain, but you can entertain different ways. It's hard to describe what the 'Cinema' way is but it's easy to recognize when it's absent.
Here is a short list of things that make blockbuster movies not Cinema:
1. CGI and the visuals are technically pretty, but coming from the same standard tooling or pipeline. You can recognize that it's just more of the same. Examples of something creative: The Fifth Element (1997), Immortal (2004), Sin City (2005), Tron, ..
2. Action scenes are made from standardized sequences, postures and phrases. 5 minutes of action rarely matters for the plot and it's not fun to watch.
3. Dialogue and characters are extremely stereotypical. Power fantasy with some jokes and funny lines.
Some movies are just a part of a format. It requires talent to stick into format and not bore the target audience. Just provide what they want better. Changing director does not change the overall format. Directors are the to perfect the execution, not create something new.
Its interesting when you read any science fiction or watch movies and TV e.g. Firefly, Blade Runner, Altered Carbon, Fifth Element etc.
In all of those there is this common theme of a major melding of Western and Chinese culture.
Will life imitate art in this case?
Sounds more like The Fifth Element.
(EDIT: BTW, that was a great categorization of a movie sub-genre!)
I am reminded of the scene in the movie Fifth Element where Leileu puts a pill in a bowl, pops it into the microwave and 3 seconds later pulls it out full of fried chicken.
Just think how cool this device could be the hands of pro special effects people who make movies like Fifth Element.
Edit: also, cosplay outfits.. man, I really want to see that thing in the hands of artists!
I was recently exposed to this interpretation of copyright law. I was trying to get an ad for 3D printing services approved and I was informed that although I personally designed and built a vase that looks like a prop from the film "The Fifth Element", I did not own the rights to reproduce it in any way, including using photos of my object. When I read into it it appeared that every visual element in a film is covered by an implicit copyright, and any derivative work based on those elements is controlled by the copyright holder. There is no practical way to acquire a license or determine if one is even necessary. I don't understand how people who blatantly derive their work from people who can't defend it feel justified in taking control of derivatives of their work from their fans.
I like to imagine that the huge planet-sized villain from the film The Fifth Element is the physical manifestation of giving one’s self over fully to the programming style of indisciminantly mixing side-effectful and I/O operations into arbitrary code whenever it’s locally convenient to do so.
Late to this game...
Galaxy Quest
V, but the original miniseries from the 80's
Close Encounters
Dune, this is controversial I'm sure!
Starship Troopers
The Day After Tomorrow
The Fifth Element
Terminator I
Alien
Aliens
Tron, oh god I nearly forgot this one from the 80's!
Books & movies can help you connect with your location or situation, they don't have to be a diversion.
When living in China I liked to watch dystopian sci-fi & anime based in large cities - Akira, Ghost in the shell, Oblivion, Dredd, The fifth element, total recall
Then grab some headphones and go for a wander around your megacity :)
PS this also works for other scenarios. Eg "Black cat white cat", or "Brother" if strapped for cash. "Fight club" if your job is getting you stressed.
I think lot of art is created by artists as a "cure" for their current worries. And their problems tend to be just like ours.
Another thing, I’ve always wondered why some movies set in the future had such outlandish outfits and makeup. Think Hunger Games or Fifth element. Defeating or confusing facial or other biometric recognition would be a very good reason. But since it’s disguised as fashion it isn’t seen as sinister.
I'm not talking about perfection, I'm talking about not being covered in blood and shit so much of the time is all, about not being scared and driven.
> You state the decoupling of psychological problems with some other undefined idealized personhood.
Can you rephrase that? English isn't my first language, and "stating decoupling of" doesn't parse at all for me. It's like there's a sentence fragment missing.
I can't easily define personhood. I know I'm one, that other people are, and I even know animals I recognize as persons, too. With super small animals and plants it gets tricky, but I don't need to fully define first for it to exist, there is something there. Any theory is an abstraction that never fully matches a reality which would remain unchanged if that theory didn't exist. Any intelligence we see and can make theories about results from actual living entitites. There is absolutely no reason to outright assume it can make sense in a vacuum. What would the AGI be intelligent for? Why wouldn't it just calculate whether the heat death of the universe will happen, and shut off if it comes to the conclusion it will? Nothing it would do would make a difference then. Humans are different, more irrational if you will. I don't believe immortality will ever be achieved, I don't even find it desirable, and still I get out of bed in the morning. Everyone I love will die, and everything I do will turn to dust. I still love and make things.
So, what would that "spark" be for AGI? I just had the dumbest association, in the movie "The Fifth Element" there is this scene where the [I forgot what the name of her role was, the female protagonist anyway] is taking in all the atrocities of humanity and gets kind of frustrated, and doesn't feel like saving them or something like that. Then Bruce Willis kisses her and it's alright. As I said, it's dumb, but still, if all we give an AI is problems, why would it come up with solutions, and not more problems?
> I would argue, and the science generally agrees, that those "psychological problems" however defined are the other edge on the sword of intelligence and relative autonomy.
Obviously a piece of rock doesn't have any of the problems or joys we do, but that doesn't just mean anything and everything just "goes with the territory".
> If we make the progress we want I expect heavy opposition.
And you're just going to steamroll over it? Fantastic. You'll go to the friendly baker next and they'll happily sell you bread because they don't know. And you can't face them one on one, so you have to "achieve significant powers" in the shadows. And you're still not seeing the woods for all the trees. No, it's their fault for not understanding what you're not even telling them.
I hope this means narrated versions of choice Wikipedia articles. E.g., listen to Wired's article "Luc Besson's Outer Limits", and afterward options appear to listen to the section from the The Fifth Element Wikipedia article about the film's production, or the sections from the Luc Besson article about his early and personal life. This would give you a big, royalty-free content pool, and is your hook to keep people engaged (cf YouTube's related videos sidebar).
Because in dystopian movies (your comment reminded me of 'The Fifth Element') they never show the 'but it's just so convenient!'-part.
Not arguing for these things, I'd never get one either, but I'm just saying there are (probably?) positive sides to having one as well.
Here's how bad China is.... I rode with a guy a couple of miles into incoming traffic just to impress me.... on a motorcycle.
Remember those Scifi chase scenes in movies like fifth element.... Felt like that.
I was thinking about something like antigravity..So cars can have six degrees of freedom...So no need to take off/land in the conventional sense...I believe movies like Blade Runner and Fifth element featured cars like that.
In that case, manual driving will be mostly like sailing a ship. Equipped with a gps, the car can maintain a course. And with a radar with a sufficient range, it can alert incoming bogies so that user can take proper action...
Great post, Its quite fascinating to see that some influences of cyberpunk owes its origin to french Sci-Fi. I would like to also add that, they are many more French influences such as Jean Giraud which have also inspired, countless artists, e.g. like Hayao Miyazaki (creator of spirited away) and worked several times together. Just to add, that one of my favorite sci-fi movies of all time, has to be the fifth element, well its concept art was made by Jean Giraud & Jean-Claude MézièresaS. And I must say that movie along with blade runner and the matrix, those movies were the best tech-noir / cyberpunk comic -movie sci-fi adaptations ever made. Merci la France.
Mœbius (Jean Giraud) was the artist who was responsible for the look of many of our favorite films (Escape from New York, Blade Runner, the Fifth Element, etc.) and he published his sci-fi works in Métal Hurlant. His impact was far reaching and he's not as well-known as he should be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Giraud
That's all I can think about when I watch SF movies with flying cars (e.g. Fifth Element, Star Wars, Natl Lampoon's Vacation).
Where do you park?
What happens if the battery dies?
Why is there so much cartoon physics?
It is terribly fascinating what they can infer from the smallest of objects. I remember reading about the Viking settlements on Greenland and how archaeologists were able to deduce that Greenland Vikings did not eat fish because of the lack of fishbones found in refuse sites.
Archaeology feels like a low-tech version of the machine that rebuilds the fifth element in the movie of the same name, from just a fragment.
I enjoy the plot where multiple groups converge on a single location to get their hands on some key object. It's the same structure as two of my favorite movies: The Fifth Element and True Romance. When the groups are stereotypes as in True Romance, I find it even more entertaining. Reamde had all of that: bikers, anti government mountain people who are armed to the teeth and gangsters from multiple foreign countries :-)
I'll see if I can check out Anathem at some point, but Baroque is really too much of a commitment for me. I'm a slow reader.
Edit: Anathem not Anathema (thanks __david__ and lmm)
Maybe I misunderstood your comment but parent was about Aliens, this is about The Fifth Element. Different movies different fictional weapons. TFE's one is more fictional.
Amazing, but weird... I am having flashbacks to the cockroach-spy scenes in the movie "Fifth Element".
Often, anticipation is what ruins a movie. All of the best movies I've seen (The Matrix, Fifth Element spring to mind) had such obtuse trailers that I had no idea what was going on before I got in there.
"Look at the popular SciFi shows of the last few years. Namely Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. Both presented a future that was lived in, almost dirty."
Good point. One reason the first three Star Wars movies were so popular is that the places they showed looked "real". They looked reasonably lived in, solid places with actual inhabitants. The Falcon looked like my parents used station wagon.
It can go wrong, the Aliens movies always end up in a future that's positively filthy. Blade Runner, I think, sits just on the fithy side of the line. But future LA feels like a real "place".
My personal favorite vision of the future is the one presented in the Fifth Element loosely based on Valérian and Laureline. It's lived in, bustling, stylish (at various levels of fashion), shiny and bright where it counts, unfashionable where it should be and just dirty enough in the places that should be dirty. Small details, like the dirt Leeloo picks up when escaping the lab, add to this feeling of solidity. Popular culture is magnified to stand out amongst the crushing masses, and it seems like a place with endless nooks and crannies to explore. It's not utopian, but it's not dystopian. It feels like what the future would be like if it were the present...and somebody made a modern day adventure movie. It has an amazing tone.
It's amazing to me that more works haven't been created in that universe.
I'll meet you halfway. It's a terrible comment about a terrible article. I agree that it's laudable to try to invent an improved version of online ratings, but this article wasn't effective in convicing me that they've succeeded.
Their argument that historgrams are just.awful. (I didn't care for the extra periods) seems to have two components: 1. asserting that historgrams are bad 2. showing us 3 histograms and saying they tell you the same thing about all 3 movies, when in fact there is a very clear and important difference between the histograms.
Its completely obvious from inspection ("people are really good at seeing patterns") that Starship Troopers has a much lower percentage of 5 star ratings than the other two, and a much higher fraction of 0 star ratings. It also appears to me that the Fifth Element has a higher fraction of 4 or 5 star ratings, and is probably the most apprciated of the 3 films, although Blade Runner is fairly close.
If you are going to cherry a set of 3 specific films to make your point, you should be sure to at least pick 3 films that support your point instead of refuting it.
We then learn about their hypothesis that while 5-star rating system sucks, a system that relies on two correlated 5-star ratings is great. They demonstrate this by using the two question system to draw the exact same conclusion I drew from the histograms of the 1 question ratings.
I would've liked some sort of objective attempt to compare the two rating systems. Perhaps it would be possible to measure how frequently the two question system leads people to make a better choice than the one question system, or at least some sort of statistical wonkery that would purport to show me that the two question system in practice draws more distinctions than the one question system. Unfortunatley we only get this one rather uninspired example ("watch this if you’re in the mood for something really good").
They also didn't address why "would you re-watch this film" is a better choice than any other second question. There are attempts to justify it being a good question, but no real evidence that other questions were tried and didn't perform.
Finally, the thing that really irked me was that this proposed system doesn't seem to do anything to address most of the actual problems with the regular 5 star system, namely that people who feel really strongly about something are more likely to rate so that most ratings tend towards the extremes, and that without context we have no idea why someone rated something a 5 instead of a 1. Those problems now exist along two dimensions instead of one.
I see this less as an article and more as an advertisement hitching a ride on an xkcd comic.
I think it's a problem of brevity. You write something, you refine, you cut out the pet witty comment. You cut your message to the bone. Now you're done.
Read the text of the article describing each movie. The correlations are absolutely meaningless. He doesn't hit on them at all. In fact, with comments like "almost nobody" he's specifically looking at averages. Then coming to a conclusion effectively based on the average of Score 1 and the average of Score 2 to determine what type of movie it is.
So on this Quality/Rewatchability grading system:
Starship Troopers: 3:4 The Fifth Element: 4:4 Blade Runner: 4.5:3.8
Drop that in place of the graphs and the conclusions would sound as seemingly valid.
I remember going to see The fifth element by Luc Besson at the cinema without knowing Jean Giraud had designed much of the set and costumes. It was overwhelming to see Jean Girauds fantasy world on the big screen after reading his comic books about John DiFool.
In some cases, the colors actually do that quite well.
For example, look at The Fifth Element. You see that patch of white between the beginning and the middle? That's the scene where Leelo is brought back, I believe. It's the only scene in the movie that I can think of where there's a significant amount of white (although it's possibly Corbin's apartment...). It struck me how recognizable it was before I saw your post, actually.
I believe this trend started with "The Fifth Element", one of the first movies to use a lot of orange. That film was visually striking at the time, because Orange was such an eye-catching color. It was also avant-garde, because Orange was considered very tacky mid-ninties.
The Fifth Element came out several years before the millenium. If you'll recall, Orange was hailed by the fashion world as the color of the millenium.
Fifth Element was styled by Jean Paul Gaultier, who is one of the few avant-garde designers to reach the highest echelon of respect in the fashion world. It is because of his rare ability to combine costume and high fashion.
Disappointingly, the visual effect of The Fifth Element is now lost. Much of its shocking visual palette is now standard. Such is fashion.
It's an easy mistake, since in the movies, New York City is usually depicted at night and Los Angeles is usually depicted at daytime. Blade Runner (and I guess The Fifth Element) reverse that.
When he asks Frommer what language it will displace, he leaves out one movie conlang I know of--The Divine Language from The Fifth Element[0]. What other movie conlangs do you guys know of?
[0]: http://www.divinelanguage.com/
Funnily enough, the article is a good description of the 1997 movie The Fifth Element (which is supposed to take place in the 2200's).