filmreroll

The Fifth Element

Added 2024-01-23 19:25:45 +0000 UTC

I've long thought that this was a perfect movie for this show, with its tight adventure plot and its imaginative world, not to mention its iconic visuals that help ground the listener in a very specific landscape. In truth The Fifth Element has some unique challenges. For one, it's pretty on-rails: The heroes need to get the Element Stones from the blue opera singer, and take them back to Egypt without getting caught by the bad guys. Those two things are kind of set in stone before the movie even starts (unless we break it in the prologue, tee-hee). Now, on rails isn't necessarily a bad thing for our show, we do a lot of movies that go in completely different directions from the actual film, so there's nothing wrong with being guided back to the story of the movie from time to time. But it is more challenging to keep it fresh and interesting when the movie is rigidly structured. Of course, even when the movie does seem to be on rails we often manage to accidentally jump the track in unexpected ways, so that's definitely still on the cards.

But the main reason its challenging is that so much of the plot happens outside of the heroes' view. There's a lot of fun intrigue and betrayal between Zorg and his mercenaries that actually drives much of the plot and creates the specific challenges that our heroes face throughout the movie. But without the omniscient viewpoint of the original film, we are simply deprived of those storylines. It's not a bad thing to streamline the storytelling, but when things are happening to your party that they don't understand and don't have agency over, that creates a set of storytelling challenges to contextualize events for the audience, and make events feel less arbitrary. Of course, the events in our movie may take a different enough course so as to obviate this particular challenge.

Anyway, excited to be doing this weird, balls-to-the-wall dreamscape. Hope we can bring it the verve it deserves.