Creating the Futurescape for the Fifth Element (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Creating the Futurescape for the Fifth Element (2019)

theasc.com

135 pointsnixass111 comments

I'm just here to share my love for this film. I'm a big movie fan. I've been watching the Fifth Element since high school, and I've only grown to appreciate it more and more as a film as I get older.

It's so full of life, creativity, color, humor, and themes we can all relate to (purpose, love, loss, etc).

This is peek Bruce Willis, and the movie is filled with other exceptional actors including Gary Oldman and Ian Holm. Milla Jovovich is extremely entertaining to watch as a sort fish-out-of-water, and I know Chris Tucker's character here isn't for everyone but in my opinion it's right on-brand for the film. Cracks me up every time for decades.

Mostly the effects have aged really well. That's generally thanks to heavy use of practical effects, as this article highlights.

I often get sad that this is becoming a lost art. Great filmmakers with big budgets are still doing this type of practical effects work (Nolan [Interstellar], Villeneuve [Dune]), but I think eventually it will be lost in time.

Agreed -- it's a wonderful film, and deserves a special place right up there with Star Wars and Harryhausen for its practical effects.

While the article mentions Moebius, I think this level of praise still merits an extra Incal callout, even if it just serves as a recommendation to those who want more of this stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incal

> but I think eventually it will be lost in time.

I don't believe it to be honest; model making and painting remains a popular hobby for millions of people, the only question is whether filmmakers will want to use it.

And recently, especially in e.g. Star Wars franchise entries, they have gone towards using models / sets again instead of just using CGI for everything.

CGI has amazing and always given me a wonderful advance for film making as a cinefile but I absolutely do not like how it replaced everything in movies for a while. Absolutely slop seeing actors in a green room trying to act through scenes and sfx puke we get instead of better directing, practical effects and magic of movies.

I agree that now we are finding our way back to a balance of using everything together to tell stories and I'm personally here for it.

I was flipping channels in a hotel and I assume the Peter Jackson hobbit/Lord of the Rings were on. The scene I watched was some sort of interior castle scene and it looked really bad. I felt like it was very flat and cardboardy and filmed on VHS.

But I wonder at what point digital effects become 'good enough' in some sense that they never look aged beyond the containing film. At some point surely there's no more perceptible 'resolution' to be had.

In practice digital effects haven’t approached being convincing the way practical effects do. In many cases, especially when used liberally, digital effects still clock as amazing digital effects rather than reality. It can be enjoyable but I don’t see what would move forward other than recognizing cgi isnt the best solution for everything.

This is not true, you just don't notice the vast majority of effects. You sit down to watch a summer blockbuster, there are 1000 shots that have been altered, pretty much anything that isn't two people talking in a room.

The advertising tries to tell you "we did everything practical!", it's always a lie and you believe it.

This comment doesn't respond to what I actually said. I said that heavy-handed CGI tends to read as CGI. You responded by "informing" me that more nuanced CGI is commonplace. Everybody knows that.

That's not at all what you said in your first comment, this is a total back pedal.

Let's forget for a second that "heavy handed cgi" is tautological because it wouldn't look "heavy handed" if it looked real, and forgetting that some things like energy beams have no analogue in real life so are obviously effects.

You said "digital effects haven’t approached being convincing the way practical effects do" and the truth is this isn't true at all, you just don't know that you're seeing digital effects and you think you're looking at photography or something practical.

Not sure if you're misreading what I wrote or arguing in bad faith, but either way I'm done here.

What you said is very clear, no one is misreading it, it just isn't true and you tried to change what you said in your reply.

You can throw your hands up, but I think if you could explain why what I'm saying isn't true you would have done that instead.

True, but that’s using “effects” in a broader sense than people seem to mean here. The discussion seems to be about the visible effects the audience experiences as effects, and whether those age well, not invisible digital cleanup, compositing, or set extension.

It's not true either way. Very little is actually practical, it's just that when something looks good people think it is practical because they want to believe that.

Marketing feeds into this and tells people movies were done all practical or made "heavy use of practical effects" and it's just lies.

This is 5 part series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo

Even before this people were saying stuff like mad max was done "almost all practical" because they saw behind the scenes stuff of flipping a few cars even though the movie is wall to wall digital effects. Sometimes the elaborate "practical effects" don't even move right and are used for reference and completely replaced.

The cast is just perfect IMHO. Super green! ;

Also one of my all time favorites.

I thought slightly less of the casting for Fifth Element after I learned about the "Born Sexy Yesterday" thing in conjunction with Luc Besson's personal life. Same with Leon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Sexy_Yesterday

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0thpEyEwi80

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Besson#Personal_life

While I enjoyed watching the movies, I feel like I would have to point out this dynamic if I were to show the movie to my kids.

That's a pretty wild take, but ok. I think you really have to be digging deep and "looking for trouble" to take issue with a fun and relatively wholesome movie like Fifth Element.

Not to mention them getting together for the Fifth Element led to the Joan of Arc movie they did together afterwards (or at least contributed).

Let's just cancel everything.

Hmm, I mean that "thing" appears to be the opinion of one guy on YouTube. Which he is entitled to of course, but I don't necessarily agree.

Especially considering he's using Leeloo as "the most quintessential example" but then also "emphasizes that the Born Sexy Yesterday trope intensifies the dynamic by positioning women as submissive rather than equal partners", which is clearly not really the case here.

Or for example a scene early on where Korben tries to kiss her, to which she reacts with a gun to his head and says "never without my permission". Doesn't really sound very innocent or without agency to me.

I get the point of the analysis and it's certainly not completely wrong, but it seems to be a bit far-fetched and incoherent to be honest.

I got the 4K BD disk to watch with my kids a couple months ago and it has aged really well, particularly the special effects.

It's a wonderful movie, definitely one of my favorites.

I cannot imagine anyone but Chris Tucker playing Ruby Rhod. He's one of the best parts of the film.

You green?

Super green

yes, so many good moments, "btw, i have a recording of her talented voice" haha

> Chris Tucker's character here isn't for everyone

Yeah this comment to me is incredibly surprising. Chris Tucker played an absolutely incredible character in that movie. So creative, so well executed, so memorable.

He was up there with Bruce Willis as top two in that film.

Such a brilliant movie - and definitely feels like a lost art.

I'm blown away by the idea of not using Chris Tucker for Ruby Rhod. It is like imagining anyone but Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. They are basically perfect castings.

> I often get sad that this is becoming a lost art. Great filmmakers with big budgets are still doing this type of practical effects work (Nolan [Interstellar], Villeneuve [Dune]), but I think eventually it will be lost in time.

Another one of the things that I appreciated from George Miller with Mad Max: Fury Road. There's definitely CG used, but so much of the stunts were real and not SpiderMan level nonsense.

In the recent Mad Max films, Miller used CG for compositing, but insisted that all the action be real. There are no CG people jumping bikes over 16-wheelers. CG was only used to get rid of safety equipment, change the sky, etc.. The results feel viscerally real.

Guitar dude's exploding rig was definitely CG. Don't kid yourself that it was limited to what you stated. Yes, the stunts were real humans, but it also had CG elements

Do you mean the flamethrower guitar? That was real.

I'm talking about the end of the flamethrower guy when the rig wrecks. There's a bunch of debris that flies around including the steering wheel that perfectly comes at camera spinning exactly times so the center wipes the frame. That sequence has lots of CG

This has tended to be significantly overblown recently with a huge amount of 'no CGI' advertising coming from studios, which often verges into utter BS. There's an incredible amount of CG at every level of modern productions, regardless of how much stuntwork and practical effects were done as well. (this video series has a good breakdown on it, which has included studios releasing doctored 'behind the scenes' footage! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo ).

That's not to say that doing these things is pointless or unimpressive, but it's often used to denigrate and minimize the work of a lot of already quite underappreciated artists.

> I'm just here to share my love for this film.

I love it too, and the best part is, I had not heard of it until my buddy dragged me to the theater to see it. I was completely blown away, and have watched it dozens of times over the years. I had the same experience when my mom took me to see the Matrix. I didn't watch much TV back then and didn't keep up with movie previews.

literally watched it last night and was struck by how much "personality" it has.

What do you mean "Chris Tucker's character here isn't for everyone"?!?!? I absolutely LOVE Ruby! You green???

The one scene I dislike in this movie is Korben lying on the bed taking to Spider about his ex.

It always just seemed out of place to me. Exclude that one scene and it's perfect as far as I'm concerned.

i don't remember that, was that when he was talking to the food truck guy? heh "last time i checked my msgs one was from my wife saying she was leaving me, the next msg was from my lawyer saying he was leaving.. with my wife." lol so many great lines.

hah whenever i see a Stay Clear sign i whisper to myself, "i'm trying". Oldman did an amazing job btw, i really enjoyed every scene he was in, "you saved my life, so i'll spare yours".

I must have watched it at least 8 times, and only on the 9th time did I pause and realize that in this movie the hero and villain never meet. Willis and Oldman almost cross at the elevator but never actually meet.

Came here to say the same

Excellent article. And a great opportunity to share one of my favorite scifi worldbuilding artifacts: the 4K matte painting used for the brief view of Manhattan during the take-off sequence:

http://web.archive.org/web/20161007133354if_/http://digitald...

The overall vision for the city is implicit but wildly creative: sea levels have dropped significantly, with the architecture of the city spreading across the newly-exposed land and leaving original structures like the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan's skyscrapers, and the Statue of Liberty towering above the landscape. There are also oodles of tiny details scattered throughout the image -- you can pore over it for a good 10 minutes and still find more to appreciate. Very cool of Digital Domain to share it originally.

Went to add this to my rotation wallpaper collection, only to realize it's already there.

One of the photog friends I have works on shooting panos of city sky lines that are used for the modern version of the matte paintings used to fill the windows in studio shoots. It's impressive to see them in person.

I took the extended WB back lot tour years ago, and part of the tour was through the matte painting shop. The scale is very impressive. To see artists on 12' ladders to work on it was a nice "human for scale" during the tour.

The circular/sphere real time screen backgrounds Favro at Disney/StarWars is using for The Mandolorian is also neat tech as well.

This scene takes place so fast, and my attention is always on the departing ship, that I never noticed the fine background details. Thanks a bunch for posting this great image!

The firth element is probably my favorite movie and I too never noticed the obvious that this single shot shows. Wild and thank you as well for sharing it!

This is amazing and absolutely brilliantly detailed for what, a 2 second shot? Thank you for sharing.

I love this movie so much it's _unreal_. What an experience, every single time.

And each time I see an article like this, I simply marvel at the immense love for art and life it has. What an incredibly talented crew, what product of mastery and care.

He continued with Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.

The Fifth Element has similar cinematic feeling as the first Blade Runner.

And now it is clear. There is the same person behind it :)

waterworld

Valerian was fun, but I really don't think it held together. Great set piece scenes though.

Valerian missed the mark; I'm sure it's got great designs (although I also believe it's mostly CGI), but the story of the movie is disjointed (which is a risk when trying to merge multiple storylines into one) and the actors are lifeless.

I really liked Valerian. The story was fine and I expected Cara to be crap but she was actually fine.

I did however very much hated Dane DeHaan's annoying voice.

I've grown to like Valerian over rewatches, but unfortunately it suffers from Besson being a massive Valerian fanboy and trying to stuff everything he possibly could into it... I think he'd have done far better if he'd gotten a more limited budget, or had to produce three of them for the cost of the one he did...

Impossible job as Valérian and Laureline has 22 volumes :)

I know, hence why I think he should have gotten a smaller budget so that he was forced to try to contain himself to one story. Then maybe it'd have done well enough for a sequel as well... It feels like he got into it thinking he had this one shot so he better see how many things he could put in it, and as a result ensured he got only one shot...

The Fifth Element and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets are widely considered to share a thematic and stylistic universe, with similar aesthetic influences. There are shared elements (ha!) and aesthetics, with Valerian even featuring a shop called "Korbens" as an easter egg to The Fifth Element.

Unfortunately the movie doesn't do it for me, the 90s were a better time.

Once CGI became good storytelling and creativity took a backseat in Hollywood.

Perfect CGI and no-grain 4K (?) flattened the feeling.

Adam Savage covered the Mondoshawan props on his channel last year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf5dPrmBvwE

It was a fun film, but Chris Tucker broke the pacing too many times for a general audience. Even now on rottentomatoes his role still distracts focus from the character arcs.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fifth_element

Was a cult classic for sure, but nowhere near Blade Runner as a film. =3

I think the film would have been better (though perhaps less successful) if Besson had toned down the occasionally exaggerated tomfoolery, like Chris Tucker's character, or the spaceship Evil (the orb described in the article) which felt almost like a SciFi parody taken out of the movie Spaceballs.

The pacing, the great costumes and set design by Moebius, the actors Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich, and the unusual ideas (like the alien opera singer) were all more than enough to carry the movie.

My counterpoint to this is that something that threatened to be a standard space opera had the delightful juxtaposition of Ruby Rhod and the opera singer. The initial appearance of Ruby Rhod really jolted my attention the first time I saw this movie. It’s weird but it works for me

Most "space opera" folks recognize, are just a close scene-by-scene copy of a classic foreign film title.

"The Hidden Fortress" (Akira Kurosawa, 1960)

https://archive.org/details/the-hidden-fortress

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Fortress

Luc Besson and Patrice Ledoux structured The Fifth Element plot very differently due to their culture. Perhaps one may also find something unique in the classics for your own enjoyment, or continue to choose to be upset with mundane facts. Goodbye =3

I cannot disagree enough. Chris Tucker's Ruby is just what this film needs. With everybody else wearing their "this is serious" face, Ruby being Ruby is a great bit of levity that really adds to this film.

What made the plot unique was Korben and Zorg never actually directly met one another in their on-screen struggles. Most never notice such details as a traditional Bouffon character often blinds viewers to subtly, and thus some lose the story arc in the chaos. It is just a poor production gamble to place Rudy, Jar Jar Binks, or most Jim Carrey characters in a genre outside absurdist slapstick comedy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouffon

Blade Runner had its own issues, but was a better film done with far less. =3

The article is missing one of the best futurescape shots in the whole movie!

http://i.imgur.com/6W5InkH.jpg

That image is only on screen for like 2 seconds, but it tells a whole story and really pulled me into the film. The first half you're deep in the city, and then finally when you get to see it from afar, it seems like a whole real city instead of the few locales they shot. Also makes it feel like a continuity of our future instead of some random alien drama.

Imgur is blocked in the UK, and last I checked blocked connections from VPNs too.

Which scene are you referring to?

Try this one?

http://www.vfxhq.com/1997/stills/fifth/welcome.jpg

It's the wide shot of NYC after they leave the spaceport.

Probably not a good example. That one seems to be very low resolution unless I'm doing something wrong.

There's another higher resolution one in the thread. If that one is blocked as well there's always reverse image search.

Works in Opera with its built-in VPN.

That's amazing, you always see flooded cities in the future this is out of the box thinking.

My post! :)

Imgur might be vastly underselling the richness of the image, depending on your browser/device. Definitely check out the full 4K version if you're only seeing a thumbnail on that page:

http://web.archive.org/web/20161007133354if_/http://digitald...

But is the cinematography there of any interest? Why would OP include it? They're talking about the hard shots, like the exploding spaceship where they need to find a spot in the desert to shoot dozens of mortars at it, or the crazy blue paint needing special UV light exposures to render just right. That looks like... a matte painting? A nice matte painting, sure, important for worldbuilding. But just that.

You're probably right that the shot isn't of interest to American Cinematographer magazine, which is why it's not included. I still think it's the best futurescape shot in the movie, serving to tie the rest of the first half together nicely.

If you enjoyed the Fifth Element absolutely watch Jodorowsky's Dune

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935156/

On the cover it's a story about the failed production of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune script but the deeper story was the aggregation of an unbelievably talented pool of visual artists including Jean "Moebius" Giraud (mentioned as central artist in 5th element), H.R. Giger, Chris Foss, Salvador Dali, & Dan O'Bannon.

That group would go on to centrally influence the visual style of a huge body of science fiction work including Alien, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Star Wars, The Matrix, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc etc.

The art and creativity on display in the film is absolutely sonic.

Kind of like the original PayPal mafia!

I wouldn't want to watch that again, as I'm just reminded we'll never get to see his Dune.

I'm still holding out hope for a cartoon of The Incal.

What I like most about the Fifth Element is that they didn't milk it through a bunch of sequels.

Very true, but I can't help but want a sequel haha. Maybe that desire proves your point... Let our imagination do the rest

Yet!

I think this one deserved at least one sequel.

Speaking of sequels, who in the star wars universe will get their own show next? Based on who is left, i put my money on Exogorth.

Fifth Element is pretty much Besson doing Valerian before he was able to get funding for Valerian, so we kinda did get a spiritual sequel of sorts.

Unfortunately, while I've grown to like the Valerian movie, when compared to Fifth Element it would seem that Besson should have been given a far tighter budget for Valerian rather than the apparent near free reign he got.

For Valerian he should have been better at casting people that had chemistry and felt real

I desperately wanted to like Valerian since I love Fifth Element, while visually striking the story line was pretty meh and OMG the casting was horrible. I think I could casually enjoy it even with the bad story if they had done better job casting.

Yeah. Really wanted to like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, but Dane DeHaan's utter lack of chemistry with his co-star (seemed like he was afraid to even look at her?) absolutely destroyed it in the worst way possible. :(

I was in Paris years ago and took these photos of the actual cab models that were on display. Enjoy https://imgur.com/a/txIHpJT

Where did you see these? I'd love to go next time I am in Paris.

It was the HQ of French company, Alstom's French headquarters is located in Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine, near Paris, at 48 rue Albert Dhalenne, 93400 Saint-Ouen, France. The display shows original props from Luc Besson’s 1997 movie The Fifth Element — including Korben Dallas’s famous yellow flying taxi and the blue-and-silver NYPD police car. Alstom keeps these pieces on display as a fun tribute to their shared focus on city mobility.

Off topic but Milla Jovovich just released an AI memory called mempalace:

https://github.com/milla-jovovich/mempalace

Interesting to see programming and acting worlds cross-pollinate.

nah, a crypto grifter released one with cooked benchmarks

There is zero history of her programming. This is a scam, using her name.

The Wikipedia article about her https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milla_Jovovich links to https://www.millaj.com/ which links to her Instagram http://instagram.com/millajovovich/ where the bio reads:

> Mother/Actress/Architect of MemPalace free and open source on GitHub

And the linktree from the Instagram profile links to https://github.com/milla-jovovich/mempalace

The parent post didn't say "unauthorized." Plenty of scams use celebrities' names/reputations and compensate then for it. See: just about every pump-and-dump cryptocoin.

WHAT?!?!? Surely you aren't telling me that the Hawk Tuah girl didn't create her own coin from scratch.

This is what you get combining shameless bunch of famous B-rated movie star, crypto dudes and Automatic programming hype (Claude in contibs)

https://github.com/milla-jovovich/mempalace/graphs/contribut...

But it is so dumb that it doesn't even add to the drift towards greater Idiocracy clock values.

her partner "engineered" it while she "architected", whatever that means in this particular case

It means she came up with the idea and partnered with someone to build the code. Pretty simple to understand.

That is a very valid concern, but in this case she is actually "involved":

https://xcancel.com/BrianRoemmele/status/2041397710113435659...

I remember when Paris Hilton was shilling NFTs.

And her last posts before these were shilling NFTs in 2022.

I’ve watched Milla on social media discussing this project, she is working with a developer who is a friend of hers to have it go forward.

I really like how well the movie aged. I recently watched it with my wife, who had never seen it, and she was hooked. Most of the effects hold up very well today and the movie is just fun.

This is actually a reprint of a 1997 article, rather than being from 2019.

And???

And it would be cool if it stated as much.

LEELOO DALLAS MULTIPASS

https://youtu.be/RdqiaNsKR2E

I have very vivid memories of watching it for the first time in the cinema (original run). I'm pretty sure I still have the ticket. I was spending winter break in the mountains, with some friends, completely snowed in. I bought the soundtrack too (on a cassette tape). Possibly the last decent movie of his.

I have fond memories of the Fifth Element, as one of my first PG-13 movies at the cinema that I was allowed to see as a 9-10 year old.

Looking back, the whole story gives a different futuristic feel to the usual gloomy polluted dystopian earths, and feels a bit, "near-future".

Seeing hover cars getting drive through McDonalds will forever be a future hope for me (my inner 10 year old self)

(2019)

(1997)

Creating the Futurescape for the Fifth Element (1997) (2019)

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