Happy Monday, readers! Let's get to crushing, shall we?
We talk a lot on this blog about world-building. We're writers, specifically screenwriters, specifically genre (horror-scifi-fantasy) screenwriters. So how a filmmaker creates their unique cinematic world and gets that world across to the audience on screen is of particular interest to us. We're actually willing to overlook a significant amount of cinematic problems as long as the world of the film is built in an interesting way. Which brings us directly to our Movie Crush this week (following the brilliant Gary Oldman over from
Batman Begins):
We have a love-hate relationship with Luc Besson. On one hand, the man is absolutely brilliant. He creates some of the most intriguing fantasy worlds in the business. He has an eye for the visual, and is usually pretty good at writing stories that let us explore his worlds in an interesting way. However... See, I struggle because I like him so much, but one can't always be nice to filmmakers just because they like them, right? The thing is that often the story parts of his films are weak, and his dialogue is almost always pretty bad (looking at you,
Valerian). Like I said, we're pretty willing to look past that because his world-building is so cool but it simply has to be said.
The exception to me is
The Fifth Element, which in my mind is one of the best pulpy scifi/fantasy films ever made. Like the pulpy scifi paperbacks of the 50's and 60's, it walks that line perfectly where cheesy meets amazing. By far this is my favorite movie of Besson's, and it's one of those that I have to watch every time I come across it flipping channels.
A huge part of this is the cast. Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich (and Ian Holm and our friend Gary Oldman of course) take dialogue that is pretty basic and breathe life into it. That's the key to a lot of scifi/fantasy, is finding actors that can make ridiculous lines feel organic. And it's what Besson often struggles with, in his movies where the cast isn't quite as good. This cast makes this crazy world feel like a real place, and that's a huge part of the brilliance of his world-building. Willis especially feels like he's just an average guy, which lends a sense of grounding to a super strange cinematic world. It works remarkably well.
And you can't really talk about
The Fifth Element without talking about the visuals. This is where Besson really shines. He packs a huge amount of information into each visual element of his films, from costuming to the design of the ships to the special effects. But to me, the best part is that everything in this movie looks worn, banged up, lived in. It keeps the world from feeling too slick, and tells you (without telling you outright) that people actually live here. Again, brilliant.
Happy watching!
CT
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