The Fifth Element, a futuristic blend of science fiction, comedy, action and arthouse sensibilities, actually begins in 1914 when an aged archeologist uncovers a universal secret. Before he can make his findings known to the scientific community, however, a gang of aliens whisk it away from him. What he found was The Fifth Element, and its purpose, along with four other elements, was to help the human race defend itself from an evil force that manifests on Earth once every five thousand years.

Fast forward through time a little bit to the Earth of the 23rd century. The Evil is about to makes it's regular appearance and the aliens who scooped up the Fifth Element are shipping it back to Earth to let it do its thing. Unfortunately for Earth, a gang of sinister Mangalorian space pirates board the freighter that the Element is on, and they steal it knocking the freighter down in the process. Scientists find only a hand left from the remains, and they clone it (in the future this practice is acceptable) and create what turns out to be a foxy rehead named Leeloo (Milla Jovavich).

Meanwhile, Evil has aligned itself with a human ally named Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg (Gary Oldman). He's going to send his army of alien thugs out to gather up the remaining four elements and open things up for The Evil to come in and lay waste to the planet.

Leeloo doesn't dig being held captive by the scientists and she soon makes a break for it and ends up in the back of a space taxi cab driven by one Major Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis). Dallas and Leeloo soon become friends and form an alliance in spite of themselves, and it's up to them to save the world.

The Fifth Element is two hours of pop-perfect eye candy. It's a wonderful blend of French arthouse style and comic book science fiction action. The plot is all over the place and it jumps around quite a bit, and some of the performances range on annoying (cough-cough-Chris-Tucker-cough-cough). But then there are the visuals – my God, the visuals. Besson has filled this movie with so much detail, so many vibrant colors and symbolic background touches that any shortcomings in the story are soon forgotten about and easily forgiven. This film looks so gorgeous and has such a good time with itself that in turn this enthusiasm becomes infectious, and ultimately it's a whole lot of fun. The film remains the most expensive French production in history and it was money well spent – even now almost ten years later, with plenty of advances having been made since this movie was shot, it still looks fantastic in the truest sense of the word.

I may be a little biased in that I find Milla Jovavich just so darned fun to look at that I could probably be entertained by watching her fold laundrey but I do believe she puts in a great performance as Leeloo. Considering that her dialogue consists mainly of a made up alien language, it's quite remarkable that at such a young age she was able to portray as much character through a series of unintelligible bleeps and bloops and a whole lot of physical emoting. Bruce Willis plays the type of character he excels at – he's down on his luck and a little rough around the edges, but at the core he's a good man who wants to do the right thing. Willis has the face and the voice to handle these kinds of roles convincingly, his performance here is no exception to that trait. Of course, Gary Oldman is given plenty of opportunity in this film to go completely over the top, and being Gary Oldman it shouldn't surprise anyone to find that he makes the most of it. His slimey character is a great villain – evil enough to be despicable and showing equal parts greed, ignorance, and evil genius.

Take the visuals and the cast and mix in a whole lot of fashionable futuristic sets, a few different alien races, and an interesting gang of supporting characters to flesh things out a little bit and The Fifth Element ends up as an enjoyable science fiction romp. The story might not be breaking any new ground but the look and feel of the movie more than makes up for that – just sit back and take it all in.

Video:

The Fifth Element is once again presented in a ravishing 2.35.1 anamorphic widescreen presentation. The previous single disc Superbit release of this title looked just great and thankfully so does this re-release. The colors are fantastic – red and orange hues, which play a big part in the look of the movie, are bold and distinct without ever bleeding into each and the black levels remain pretty much rock solid from start to finish. Flesh tones look nice and life like, never too pink or too yellow, and the wildly colorful visuals of the film come shining through very nicely.

There's plenty of detail present throughout the film and the image is stable for the duration. Mpeg compression is virtually non-existent and while there is some minor edge enhancement in a couple of scenes, it's a very minute problem even at the worst of times and it doesn't pull you out of the movie or ruin the viewing experience. There's a lot of detail in both the close up items on the screen and in the background of the picture as well, aside from a couple of specks here and there, the picture is free of any major blemishes or print damage.

If you've already got the single disc Superbit disc, you probably won't notice much of a difference in picture quality on this DVD (which also sports the Superbit logo on the back of the packaging) as they only extra feature on the 'movie' disc is the fact track, which is essentially a subtitle and doesn't take up much space at all.