The Fifth Element (1997 / 2017)
[movie]
I spontaneously invited some friends over to rewatch The Fifth Element—and that's how I found out it got a 4K remaster back in 2017. I'd never seen it look this fucking good before; mad respect to whoever did the restoration.
Visual quality aside, the film still holds up great. Yeah, the pacing's a bit off compared to modern blockbusters, so occasionally it might lose your attention. But honestly, how many recent films match this kind of scale? A massive cast, shitload of locations, and saving-the-world stakes thrown in for good measure.
The special effects still slap. To age this well, it took three different fucking departments at the time: one handling practical sets and physical models, one for creature design, and another for CGI. Plus, they clearly sold their souls to Satan to merge all that seamlessly. This level of effects mastery reminds me only of Lucas’s original Star Wars or Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Besson obviously learned from the absolute best.
The script still delivers and it’s genuinely funny in spots. It’s a proper blockbuster, highly entertaining yet casually touching on serious shit like corruption, living conditions, the value of life, existential dread, and whether this shitty world even deserves saving. The characters are intentionally flat and cartoonish—the villain is hilariously villainous, the hero’s a classic manly man, his love interest is well, the love interest, plus a couple of comedic sidekicks, and an army of extras primarily serving as walking Jean-Paul Gaultier mannequins. This works well enough for popcorn cinema, though it does feel kinda awkward today, especially since almost no one has real agency and the whole macho narrative is pretty stale.
Still, this is damn good cinema—handcrafted with passion, genuinely unique, and loaded with fun celebrity cameos.