Part One: Plot
Sequence 1: In 1914 in a temple in Egypt, a scientist analyzes symbols on the wall which tell a story about an evil force. A priest tries to poison the scientists to prevent them from discovering more. A spaceship lands and aliens emerge. They open a vault and remove four stones and a statue, the fifth element. One of the scientists shoots at the aliens, causing the vault to close with an alien inside.
Sequence 2: 300 years later, on a spaceship, military officers monitor a growing dark planet. The president approves a plan to destroy it. The planet gets bigger as it is attacked.
Sequence 3: Korben wakes up from a bad dream in his apartment in Brooklyn, New York. He outsmarts a man trying to rob him and leaves for work in his taxi.
Sequence 4: A spaceship carrying the stones is shot down by pig-like aliens called Mangalores. A man named Zorg receives a call from the Mangalores confirming the attack.
Sequence 5: The fifth element, who looks like a human woman, is regenerated from remains from the spaceship crash. She escapes and falls through the roof of Korben’s taxi. He takes her to the priest.
Sequence 6: After Zorg realizes the Mangalores did not retrieve the stones from the spaceship attacked, his henchman spies on the president, and learns the stones will be on a planet called Fhloston Paradise.
Sequence 7: General Munroe asks Korben to retrieve the stones. Korben’s neighbor is kidnapped by Mangalores who believe he is Korben. The priest steals Korben’s passes to Fhloston Paradise.
Sequence 8: David, an associate of the priest, a Mangalore man, and one of Zorg’s henchmen all try to imitate Korben in order to go to Fhloston Paradise but the real Korben gets on board with Leeloo. Korben is pulled aside to meet Ruby Rhod, a talk-show host. Ruby tries to interview Korben but only gets a couple of words out of him. As they take off, Ruby has sex with a flight attendant.
Sequence 9: On Fhloston Paradise, Korben goes to an opera. Ruby tries to interview Korben and receives a one word response. Mangalores break into Plavalaguna’s room but Leeloo bursts in and fights them. As she escapes, Zorg shoots her. Plavalaguna is shot by Mangalores. Zorg sets a bomb.
Sequence 10: Plavalaguna dies and Korben removes the stones from her abdomen. He fights the Mangalores while Ruby protects the stones. Zorg returns and deactivates the bomb. Korben, Leeloo, the priest, and Ruby escape. The Mangalores blow themselves up along with Zorg.
Sequence 11: The president is told that the evil planet is moving quickly towards Earth. Leeloo learns about war on the computer.
Sequence 12: In the temple, Ruby, the priest, David, and Korben open the stones by exposing them to their corresponding elements. To activate Leeloo as the fifth element, Korben tells her he loves her and kisses her. A beam of light explodes from her body and the dark planet is shown, dead.
Sequence 13: The president comes to the science lab to meet Korben and Leeloo. They are having sex inside the reactor in which Leeloo was reconstructed.
Part Two: Frame Analysis
At the moment 00:58:13, we find a frame within a frame within a frame. The outermost frame is foregrounded by the hand of Zorg’s henchman. The hand is out of focus and carefully positioned so as not to block the important aspects of the inner two frames. Beyond the hand, the outermost frame is completely dark, giving the viewer the sense that they are inside of the cockroach shown in the previous shot. In the outermost frame, the camera is stable and positioned at the level of the controller’s hand. Because the camera is not at the controller’s eye level, the viewer is not led to identify with him. Instead, this camera position and its upward tilted angle ascribe to the viewer a cockroach-like position towards the man inside the cockroach.
Due to the camera’s position and angle, the viewer can see the screen examined by the controller. The screen serves as the second frame. This frame is unmoving and is organized into different windows with functions including “exit,” “check,” “timer,” and “method.” It occupies the center of the outermost frame and is bounded by the darkness beyond the screen. The innermost frame is shot from the height of the table with the camera tilted dramatically upward toward the president, shaking as it moves towards him. It provides the point of view of the cockroach. The innermost frame is split between the president and his reflection in the table. Behind the president is an unknown employee who, unlike the president, appears to be facing the camera directly. The president appears to be sitting low at the table, in fact, not very far above the cockroach. The president has his shoe in his hand, foreshadowing the roach’s death.
This frame, in relationship with the frame which immediately precedes it, suggests a similarity between the president and the cockroach. The darkness of the space in which the controller works leads to an understanding of the controller as being inside the cockroach. He can also be read as being the bug himself. The aural aspects of the frame support the man as cockroach portrayal: the clicking of the controller replaces the clicking of the cockroach in the previous shot. The abrupt cut from the cockroach shot to this shot at 00:58:13 also ties together the president reflected in the table and the cockroach crawling across the table in which it is also reflected. Thus, the cockroach is associated with both the controller and the president, the two black men in this scene. The following shot of the president smashing the cockroach may provide conscious or unconscious pleasure to an anti-black racist audience: it is a depiction of a black man, who is characterized throughout the film as a powerless president constantly in need of advice from white advisors, killing another black man through the cinematic enactment of an old racist metaphor: black people as cockroaches.