Now, the Blu-ray picture is as solid as the film, with two blow-you-away sound options.
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Bruce Willis is back in Blu. Again.
After a first release that was discontinued, Luc Besson's "The Fifth Element" is back on Blu-ray . . . and yes, it looks better than the first transfer. The first one looked a little "soft," but transfer has a crisper look to it. If you compare the first scenes side-by-side, you can also see that some of the film's imperfections have been cleaned up.
If ever a film was cut out for Blu-ray, it's this futuristic foray that's a feast for the eyes. Once you get past the 1913 prologue, where an Egyptologist runs afoul of extraterrestrial beings and a cult of priests that the otherworldy ones put in charge of powerful and precious stones, it's like Dorothy entering Oz. Fast-forward 300 years and you get non-stop futuristic images that flash by, often at breakneck speed.
I'm usually a little wary of futuristic films. Jules Verne set the bar pretty high, and more than a few "visionaries" since then have simply lacked the imagination or the sense of culture, science and technology to map out an interesting but still believable scenario for future life. Flamboyant cyberpunk costumes aside, Besson and his designers have come up with enough innovative little things in daily futuristic life where you can't help but notice and think how "right on" they seem, or else his futuristic gizmos give us the same pleasure as those prehistoric gadgets from "The Flintstones." Yes, there are the obligatory flying cars (and even a flying cruise ship), and a futuristic cityscape worthy of George Lucas (as, of course, are the creatures in this film). But the futuristic interiors and exteriors are a big strength.
So is Bruce Willis, who has a great deal of fun playing a roguish taxi driver who gets the fare of his life. Willis plays Korben Dallas, an ex-Major who has an ostentatious shelf of trophies and medals in his kitchen to prove how good he was before he became a civilian. There are other reminders. Early in the film, a bare-chested Willis is awakened by a futuristic alarm, goes through his morning motions, and casually disarms a drugged-out punk with a weird-looking gun who greets him the moment he opens his door. Welcome to the 23rd Century!
And that was just a minor problem. For the major one, it seems a giant flaming and festering ball of evil that resembles the Death Star with a molten surface is heading toward earth, and warships aren't having any luck trying to destroy it. Call this "Yet Another 48 Hours," because that's how much time the planet has before the evil blob acclimates to Earth's atmosphere and wreaks its havoc.
Korben is enlisted by his old commander to meet a contact on an exotic resort ship in order to get the stones from her. As it turns out, he's not the only one after the stones. Mr. Zorg (Gary Oldman), who's dressed like the ultimate cyberpunk but talks like Jethro Clampett, seems to serve the evil blob. He wants the stones, and so he hires the Mangalores, a bunch of alien morphing mercenaries, to help him get them. Also involved is a "practically perfect" woman, and we're not talking Mary Poppins. Milla Jovovich stars as Leeloo, the great red-aired hope and "fifth element." In one of the coolest and most visionary sequences in the film, a gloved hand is brought to a lab and we watch machines totally reconstruct the destroyed being who was once attached to that hand. And to the delight of these leering lab men, they end up constructing a beautiful naked woman. She speaks only the language of the Gods, and spooked by her surroundings, she bolts and does a high dive into air-traffic, only to fall into Korben's cab. Thus begins a crazy odyssey that careens from here to absurdity en route to that inevitable final confrontation with evil.
The most nonsensical scenes involve a flaming TV/radio-host named Ruby Rhod (Chris Tucker), who skips about with a slender headset and thumping theme music, even as the fate of life as we know it is teetering on the brink. And while life-as-we-know-it continues to teeter, Ruby prattles and prances and screams louder and more often than Shelley Winters, which, needless to say, can be grating. But that's the only flaw in this space-age ointment. Visually it's a fun film, and even Oldman's character and thugs are funky enough to where you roll with it. Besson takes viewers on a wild ride. With a big budget reportedly in the 90 million range, the director combines a plot involving "Atlantis" stone mysticism with "Star Wars"/"Star Trek" aliens, outlandish "Barbarella" outfits, and a kind of "Bladerunner"/"Zoolander" cyberpunk feel and soundtrack. And who better to play a former hero and current taxi driver about to help save the world than that old diehard, Bruce Willis? "The Fifth Element" is as visually stimulating as a video game and has all the audio excitement of really wild music video. In short, it's a lot of fun, from start to finish--in spite of the excessive camera time that Ruby Rhod gets.
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