Synopsis

In 2263, former soldier turned cab driver Korben Dallas becomes entangled with Leeloo, a mysterious woman who falls into his taxi. Together with a priest and a motley group of allies, he must recover four elemental stones and unite them with the Fifth Element before an ancient force of destruction reaches Earth. Their race spans futuristic New York and a luxury space hotel.

Factoids & Trivia

• The story was conceived when its creator was 16 and developed for nearly two decades before reaching the screen.

• French comic artists Jean "Moebius" Giraud and Jean-Claude Mezieres helped shape the film's distinctive visual world, contributing to its colorful comic-book aesthetic and futuristic architecture.

• Jean-Paul Gaultier designed the costumes, including approximately 900 outfits worn by extras in the Fhloston Paradise sequences. He reportedly inspected them each morning before filming.

• The Diva Dance combines music from Gaetano Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor with an electronic composition by Eric Serra. Albanian soprano Inva Mula supplied the Diva's singing voice, which was digitally processed to achieve passages considered impossible for a human singer to perform naturally.

• The production was filmed primarily at Pinewood Studios in England, using nine soundstages. Its visual effects combined computer graphics, greenscreen work, models, and miniatures.

• The film premiered as the opening selection of the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. With a reported $90 million budget, it was regarded at the time as the most expensive European film ever made and later became a major international commercial success.