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Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element combines satire, Heavy Metal comic book style storytelling and old fashioned action science fiction into a visually stunning two hour visit with the 23rd century. This Ultimate Edition of the film takes the Superbit Edition of the film released two years ago and combines them with a second disc of extras never previously seen. Planned before Leon: The Professional but shot after the success of that film The Fifth Element like all of Besson’s films has his unique mixture of fascination with American film genres and French stylized cinema. Besson’s films, like Terry Gilliam, mixes in a healthy dose of satire into his jaunts into the different genres that dominate American cinema. Unlike Gilliam, however, Besson’s films have a healthy dose of commercialism mixed in with all these other elements making them more easily accessible to a general audience and, hence, guaranteeing success. ***

Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) unwittingly stands between the domination of ultimate evil and the triumph of good. In the 20th century an alien race visits Earth to remove four stones that provide protection against an outside evil force from another dimension. A group of priests are entrusted with the secret of activating these four stones with a fifth element that will destroy the evil force should it ever cross over to our universe. In the 23rd century former soldier and taxi driver Dallas ferries fares throughout a futuristic New York City full of flying cars. When Leeloo (Mila Jovonvich) an alien reconstructed from an accident literally drops through the roof of Dallas’ cab, he’s suddenly entrusted with delivering the world from a powerful evil. With the help of a priest named Cornelius (Ian Holm) the three of them must find the stones hidden on an alien world, bring them back to Earth and prevent the Mangloids an evil race of mercenaries and Zorg (Gary Oldman) a buck toothed wealthy arms merchant from capturing the stones and assisting the great evil from conquering the Earth. ---

Wow! The Superbit Edition of previously released two years ago in a high definition edition has been combined with a second disc of previously unreleased extras including a number of marvelously detailed featurettes, camera, set and costume tests and interviews with the principle designers on the film. The rich color and extremely detailed transfer here is among the best DVDs I’ve seen in recent years. While it has some of the digital blemishes that have plagued Columbia Tristar releases over the years, these are minimal and pretty easily to overlook. The most noticeable is occasional edge enhancement. Overall, this transfer ranks among the best that Columbia Tristar has done in recent years.

The marvelously detailed 5.1 Dolby Digital mix and DTS soundtrack has enormous warmth and presence. Both sound terrific although the DTS soundtrack has a slight edge with a warmer, deeper sound than the 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround Sound mix. ---

In addition to the featurettes we get a number of the camera, costume and set tests shot prior full scale production of the film. The Visual Element focuses on the origin of the film and the influence of the magazine Heavy Metal and, more importantly, artist Moebius’ influential art work. In addition to influencing the film, Moebius actually did design and conceptual work after Besson wrote his script. Moebius and the production designer (who have known each other for years) collaborated on creating the look of the film with Besson. The Digital Element interviews the visual effects director Mark Stetson of Digital Domain and Visual Effects Director of Photography Bill Neil both comment on the difficulty in creating the complex visual effects. Evidently much of New York City (because of the time the film was made in 1996) was built in miniature combing these miniatures with CGI created elements to create a convincing city of the future. Combing these elements with large scale sets created the convincing look of the film.

Since the film was shot in 2.35:1 creating the visuals were even more of a challenge as anamorphic lenses make it difficult to shoot miniatures and effects and make them look absolutely convincing. The Star Element is broken into three sections focusing on Bruce Willis, Milia Jovovich and Chris Tucker discussing how they became involved in shooting the film. new interviews with Willis and others illuminate the working process Besson developed with each actor. This section also includes camera tests with Jovovich shot prior to principle photography. Jovovich had to learn a new language created specifically for her character which made it a challenge initially as she had to learn 800 words from Besson’s imaginery language.

Chris Tucker the most annoying actor in the film (at least initially although he’s either improved over time or I’ve become immune to his annoying voice and attitude). Tucker’s interview provides considerable background on his involvement from the first time he saw the script to many of the onset surprises including wearing the “dresses” designed for his character and many of the stunts (some of which the actors had to perform to a limited extent). The Alien Element discusses the four races of aliens created for the film; the Mondoshawans (the good guys of the piece), the Mangalores (the mercenaries and bad guys), the Picasso (Zorg’s pet) and a puppet and the Strikers which aren’t even seen in the movie. These last aliens were the garbage collectors who were on strike. We see behind-the-scenes footage of them in thre rubbish with placards and creature effects screen tests with the puppeteers. Each alien race receives a featurettea bout them and how they were conceived as well as screen tests.

Nick Dudman the creature effects supervisor discusses the difficulty in creating these aliens since they appear in the most awkward costumes one could imagine for a human to operate. For the Mangalores we see a featurette discussing their design We get a head test focusing on how the heads would work in production and a deleted battle sequence. Dudman discusses the challenges of casting the roles; the actors had to be muscular with small heads to fit inside the animatronic headpiece. Gary Pollard provides much of the background here as he was involved in designing the actual animatronic headpieces. ---