Fifth Element's most redeeming scene was the awakening of Milla Jovovich, and even that scene was just a token offering to the male audience, useful for trailers and such.

Yes, the sterile yet simultaneously filthy feel of the cities owes a lot to French modernism and a prevailing European sensibility which revolves around mass transit and apartments. Le Corbusier worked his whole life to get the world into inhuman mass housing, with designs so bad that they baked occupants in summer and froze them in winter - but they looked "efficient" and "communal" and that was all that mattered. Like the Bauhaus practicioners of form over function, the movie constantly irritates because of the inferior/dysfunctional feel of this future metropolis.

You'll naturally be thrilled to hear this: that is the future world liberalism tries to create and which exists already in Europe to a great degree. A government based police state, people with no morals living in cubicles who are dependant upon mass transit to move through a soulless, perverted and spiritually sterile landscape - Europe's big cities described to perfection.

Bruce Willis, the conservative tough guy, naturally is an anathema to this liberal police state and his own moral code must prevail, even though it flies against the soulless, clueless and deviant state.

Once was enough. Everytime I travel to Europe, and even just surfing over to Le Monde or the <A HREF=">BBC, I get a small repeat performance of the State=God mindset found in The Fifth Element.

That's probably one of the primary reasons that film did horrible box office here and is not liked; the future world it presents hits too close to home for many soulless materialists and with that message muddied by unremarkable performances, bad dialogue and poor chemistry, it doesn't even clearly deliver that well. Like Blade Runner, which also did poor initial box office - these films find favor with folks who are either big fans of a specific actor/actress or like the "mood" created by the music, cinematography and sets.

In a nutshell, they're "downer" sci-fi films and those don't go over well with the non "artsy" crowd.

;-)

PS You think I brought up politics on purpose? Nah, with this film such discussion was inescapable.