1997 was the year of Pokémon, Tamagotchi, and movies that brought me great comfort. Let’s travel back in time and revisit one of my all time favorite movies, The Fifth Element.

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Transcription of episode (provided by Ava Barbieri)

Carina Rivera
Hi, it’s DJ B-Love and welcome back to the movies. Today, I’m going to be revisiting one of my all time favorite movies, “The Fifth Element”, starring Milla Jovovich, Bruce Willis and Chris Tucker, among many other huge stars. The Fifth Element was released in May of 1997. Let’s revisit some of the other things that were incredibly popular during that year. Hanson was well known, they’ve been putting out songs since ’92 but their famous song, “MMMBop”, came out in 1997. Other movies released that year, “Titanic”, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, “Men in Black”, starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, “Good Will Hunting”, with Matt Damon and Robin Williams, Ben Affleck, the original “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was published in the UK in June of 1997. Tamagotchis were one of the most popular Christmas toys and Pokémon aired for the very first time in Japan in April of 1997. Last but not least, Final Fantasy Seven, still one of my all time favorite PlayStation games, was released, and it’s actually been remade and released from the PlayStation five, but It was released on the original PlayStation in 1997. “The Fifth Element” was directed and written by Luc Besson, starring Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman, Chris Tucker and Milla Jovovich. It had a budget of $90 million and it made $263 million in the box office. Bruce Willis plays ex-military operative and a cab driver named Korben Dallas. Milla Jovovich plays a young woman who is sort of reincarnated from the remains of an alien species, but she looks human, and she’s said to be the perfect being. One of the most famous lines in this movie that people still say to this day, whenever it’s brought up, is “Leeloo Dallas Multi-pass”. Oh, Chris Tucker plays Ruby Rhod. Originally, apparently they wanted to cast Prince in the role of Ruby Rhod, but they actually got Chris Tucker to play the role, which I honestly love. He said that he modeled a lot of his mannerisms at what he thought Prince would do in the role. Gary Oldman plays Zorg. And apparently he has admitted that he is not a fan of this movie. He only took the role as a favor to Besson. I really love Zorg in this movie, he’s just got that like comb over, just the mannerisms and the charisma, it’s, he’s plays just an interesting villain, but he isn’t even the main villain in the movie. He works for some evil entity that takes form of a giant asteroid that’s headed towards Earth. For the role of Korben Dallas, they originally approached both Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson for the lead role. Eventually, Mel Gibson turned it down, obviously, because we ended up as Bruce Willis as Korben Dallas. Not only that, they were considering Julia Roberts for the role of Leeloo, but it was said that Milla Jovovich was chosen in the end because Besson or some of the casting directors saw her swimming with no makeup on, and they just loved her natural look. Also in this movie is Tommy Debo “Tiny” Lister Jr. He is more well known as playing Deebo in the movie “Friday”, where he all plays with his own name, Deebo. He plays President Lindberg, honestly, I absolutely love him in this role as the president. He did it very well. I really remember an iconic scene towards the end where I remember, in this scene at the very end of the movie, where he answers the phone. He’s like, this is the President, and he’s talking to Korben’s mom, and she just starts going off on this rant, he makes this stink face sort of and just starts handing the phone off as if it has something on it. And he just keeps, they keep handing it off to different people as she’s like, yelling into the phone. He played this role really well, comedic as well as serious when it needed to be. So it was really good to see him in another role, I haven’t seen him in a lot of films, even though he has been in quite a bit. “The Fifth Element” takes place in a dystopian future where people live miles above the Earth and have to use hover cars and other modes of transportation to get above smog that has taken over the earth. The movie opens in 1914 where aliens known as Mondoshawans, make contact with Earth, and you see Luke Perry and another doctor, basically in an ancient Egyptian temple reading hieroglyphics that speak of a divine light and other ancient creatures that come to Earth. A priest is part of a secret order who is trying to deter them from discovering the secrets of this temple. When the aliens reemerge to take the sacred stones somewhere safer, and they will return when evil returns .Milla Jovovich just plays an incredibly beautiful role as Leeloo. She is a Mondoshawan who had been shot down. And, you know, cut to, obviously, from 1914 to the future, and the evil has returned. So the Mondoshawans are returning, and their ship is shot down by the Mangalores. Speaking of this movie just kind of cracks me up a little bit, because it’s just, there hasn’t been one like to me. I know that they’ve made attempts to make other movies similar, but just nothing has really stricken me the way this has. But I think at one point, when the movie “Valerian” came out, they were saying it was going to be as received, as well received as “The Fifth Element”. But it was not. It does not even compare. So if you don’t know, “Valerian” is another movie by Luc Besson. So it’s another futuristic sci-fi movie, and it was shot in 2017 so you have a good 20 years later another futuristic sci-fi movie from the same group. Leeloo and Korben happen to stumble upon each other when leeloo is escaping from a lab as she’s sort of reincarnated, regenerated from the leftovers that were recovered from this ship crash. And as she dives from a building, lands through the roof of Korben Dallas’s cab. And from there, the graphics in this movie from 1997 CGI was, was pretty phenomenal. Ultimately, in the end, LeeLoo is traveling across the galaxy in order to find the stones that need to be returned to the temple from the original scene. Once they find these stones and release the elements within, she releases her divine light and then banishes the evil that comes to destroy the Earth. This movie had me in a chill, cold. I absolutely wanted to be Leeloo Dallas, I wanted to be the character that just like falls in love with Bruce Willis in the end. Chris Tucker’s performance was one, this was what I knew him from. I know he played in “Friday” before this, as did the President who, Deebo, who plays his Deebo in “Friday” is also in this movie. But I like I know Chris Tucker was also in “Rush Hour” with Jackie Chan, but this was one of the first movies that I recognize him from, because it was just the flamboyant behaviors, just the charisma, the confidence, the just exaggerated behaviors of Ruby Rhod. He was just such an interesting character, and his outfits just changed drastically, from the all leather, you know, jumpsuit that had the giant collar to the dress, the black satin dress with the roses, and then he had that staff that was a microphone/synthesizer. He had such amazing energy in this movie. It was just so fun to watch. An interesting fact about this movie is the scene with the opera singer Diva Plavalaguna was almost lost in an accident. So in the 90s, movies were not filmed digitally. They were actually using film. And apparently during transit, the film carrying this scene fell from transport and had been run over by a forklift. They had an amazing film editor who had to splice together the footage that we do see in the movie from what was left over. One of my favorite scenes from this movie is Leeloo is at the home of Vito Cornelius, the priest that she was seeking out in order to make her way back to the temple. And she’s learning the English language and the history, and it’s just like going through the alphabet on the computer. And she’s seeing flashes of images, and then every now and then, she’ll deep dive into different types of words and phrases, but she gets up, sprinkles a little seasoning into this bowl, pops it into what looks like a microwave, and seconds later, an entire rotisserie chicken comes out, and she’s just sitting there eating an entire rotisserie chicken, to herself. This scene just cracks me up because she just keeps saying “Chicken! Good!” It just looks delicious, honestly. Another one of my favorite scenes from this movie is when the police are coming through to try to find Korben Dallas, and they pop on the outside of everybody’s apartment and they ask if he could be classified as human. Instead of affirming that he is a human, he says “Negative, I am a meat popsicle”, which is just such a strange and random line. It’s one of those ones that just it sticks with you and is funny and in such a high tense moment that this, this movie has so many of these obscure lines so I genuinely have always enjoyed. Rewatching it because I pick up on something new every time, from the lines of Ruby Rhod constantly talking about, “Are you green? Or super green?” Or Leeloo saying anything from her lines, honestly, just, it’s a lot of the background characters popping in a line or gesture that really sells this movie. I want to thank you for joining me for this recap of “The Fifth Element”, and be sure to come back as we go back to the movies.