The Fifth Element places the hopes of all mankind on the shoulders of Korben Dallas (Willis) after the supreme being (Jovovich) falls into his taxicab. His mission to find the Fifth Element referred to in the film's title is complicated by the fact that evil Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg is also in hot pursuit.
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Every five millennia, the Mondoshawans come to Earth, posing as Lords to their human priests. The Mondoshawan placed five powerful elements in a temple in Egypt eons ago. The first four -- water, fire, earth, and air -- are in the form of small elongated cubic stones, and the Fifth Element encased in a sarcophagus in a shape of a person mouth widely open facing upward.
In 1914, the Mondoshawan guardians took the elements away and returned 300 years later with the Fifth Element, when Evil attacks in the form of a black sphere that communicates with its human puppets telepathically. The first four elements were bestowed by the Mondoshawans to a sky-blue alien opera singer, Plavalaguna, for protection. (It is interesting that "plava laguna" means "blue lagoon" in Serbian language; this is a reference to Mila Jovovich's first film, Return to the Blue Lagoon.)
Zorg (Oldman), a puppet, orders the destruction of the travelling Mondoshawan spaceship. The Earthlings are, however, able to retrieve from the crash site a decapitated hand within a glove, which were regenerated to reveal Leeloo, an amazingly intelligent and strong Fifth "Element". Leeloo, however, immediately escapes the laboratory cage and dove into Korban's taxicab.
Immediately after a concert in an opera house-spaceship orbiting a planet, Plavalaguna was shot. After retrieving the four elements out of her, Korban and Leeloo return to the temple in Egypt and dispel the evil. At the end, it is revealed that "love" is the fifth element.
In the second half of Plavalaguna's performance, the music as well as the singing suddenly and dramatically turned to techno style from classical. This change is accompanied by scenes alternating between the performance and Leeloo's fight with a dozen aliens in Plavalaguna's chamber.
Some pieces in the score have a Middle Eastern flavour to it. The popular taxicab chase scene music, "Alech Tradi", by Khaled, is excluded from the movie soundtrack, however.
The diva dance opera was voiced by Inva Mula-Tchako. As Plavalaguna is an alien, the music was scored with some vocalisations that are physically impossible for a human to produce; digital sampling and editing techniques were used for these.Plot
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