Film review – Conrad – 21/5/97
French director Luc Besson (The Big Blue, The
Professional, Nikita) sets up a classic good and evil scenario complete with an intelligent dark
force played by a large all consuming ball of
fire in space, and aided by the nasty Zorg played by ubiquitous baddy Gary Oldman (is it my
imagination or did they deliberately make him
look like Hitler?).
They’re up
against a priest (Ian Holm), who displays
remarkable (and slightly unbelievable) powers of
linguistics to understand LeeLoo (Milla
Jovovich), the Fifth Element, a beautiful and
deadly yet strangely fragile perfect being who
has come to save the human race, and our
reluctant hero, Bruce Willis, also rapidly
becoming ubiquitous in this sort of action role.
In fact there were moments when I had a feeling I was watching Twelve Monkeys, before it became Die Hard 10 in outer space.
Visually the film
is great, from the Bladerunner type futuristic
city (in fact many of the set designers worked on that film), to Jean-Paul Gaultier’s future-chic
costume design, to the special effects.
Unfortunately these attributes are balanced out
by a predictable standard plot-line (does anyone
really believe that they might fail?) that even
leaves Bruce and the perfect woman falling in
love, despite the fact that she’s nearly
dead and apparently doesn’t experience such
a human emotion.
Added to this are
the standard characters as mentioned above, an
unremarkable soundtrack, and the occasional plot
flaw. It’s hard to believe that this is the film
Besson claims he’d long wanted to make, using a
plot he’d been working on for years (maybe he
worked on it too long).
So what does this
leave in terms of entertainment? It’s slick, it looks great, it has pace, and as an action
movie which, lets face it, sets out simply to
entertain rather than to enlighten, it works
well. In comparison with more recent science
fiction action movies it rates reasonably well,
due in as much to the crassness of such glorified and overrated US military propaganda as
Independence Day and (shudder) Stargate. However
it’s no Bladerunner, Star Wars or Twelve
Monkeys, and offers nothing new to the genre like these did.
Conclusion: great
action entertainment if you’re able to
disengage your brain, otherwise a waste of
planetary resources.
Visit the official
(shockwave enhanced)
Web site for games, info, the inevitable T-shirts, and multimedia including downloadable trailers and
teasers, wallpapers for your pc or mac, and
colouring-in pictures for the kids to print out.
