The Fifth Element 4K Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		5.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		4.5

The Fifth Element 4K Blu-ray Movie Review

"Negative, I am a meat popsicle."

Reviewed by Kenneth Brown November 24, 2025

Just in time for holiday shopping and potentially ideal for those French alt-genre film-fans in your family or friend group comes the Luc Besson 9-Film Collection from Sony, which offers six of the controversial filmmaker's movies on 4K UltraHD with Dolby Atmos tracks and three additional flicks on standard Blu-ray with DTS-HD Master Audio. Besson has a messy, I'll just call it "icky" personal past (a word that feels generous), but for those who can separate art from an artist's alleged and/or admitted misdeeds, this box set makes for a solid albeit flawed gift. The films included in the collection are black-and-white post-apocalyptic drama Le Dernier Combat (The Last Battle, 1983), stylized crime dramedy Subway (1985), theatrical and director's cuts of off-kilter romance The Big Blue (1998), proto-Wick assassin thriller Le Femme Nikita (1990), underwater documentary Atlantis (1991), theatrical and extended versions of the beloved, fan-favorite Leon: The Professional (1994), zany '90s sci-fi epic The Fifth Element (1997), domestic and international cuts of underrated historical biopic The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), and visually striking supernatural noir Angela-A (2005).

Besson's hero is Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis), a former soldier who is reluctantly recruited into a half-baked attempt at protecting the Earth from an alien attack while kicking ass and taking names along the way. On the edge of our solar system, a mysterious entity has joined forces with the evil Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg (Gary Oldman), a corrupt industrialist who sounds eerily like Ross Perot, in a plot to destroy the planet. Only the mysterious Fifth Element can save the Earth from impending doom. Dallas will have to team up with an eccentric cast of characters including Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), a nonsense-talking runaway with a secretive past, and Ruby Rhod (Chris Tucker), an effeminate, hyperactive, intergalactic talk-show host who never shuts up.

Click here to read the rest of Ben Williams's review of the film, which he calls "seriously strange but also an extremely enjoyable science fiction flick." Adding, "The Fifth Element stands as a remarkable achievement in imaginative filmmaking; unafraid of simply being blissfully fun."

The Fifth Element 4K Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Click here to read Martin Liebman's 4.5/5.0 review of The Fifth Element's 2160p UHD presentation. Unlike the initial 2017 4K release and subsequent SteelBook re-releases, though, this new presentation does feature Dolby Vision, which to my eyes adds a welcome bit of punch to the palette. Not enough to justify a bump in score, but a boost worth mentioning. (Any arguably deserved bump in score is offset by the remnant of artificial sharpening I can't unsee throughout the presentation, in case you're looking for the method to my madness.)

The Fifth Element 4K Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Click here to read Martin Liebman's 5.0/5.0 review of The Fifth Element's Dolby Atmos experience.

The Fifth Element 4K Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The new edition of The Fifth Element included in the Luc Besson Collection offers up two extras that haven't previously been made available -- a "Making of The Fifth Element archive featurette (SD, 25 minutes) and a "Blooper Reel" (HD, 6 minutes) -- in addition to all the extras included on the film's previous BD and 4K releases, which are detailed here.

The Fifth Element 4K Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Fifth Element is a zany, divisive, utterly trippy trip through Besson's imagination (as squeezed through a Mœbius lens), and a lot of people hate it. Not me. It was a big-dumb-fun blast in 1997 and it remains one of my go-to guilty pleasures to this day. Sony's 4K release brings a striking 4K presentation, engrossing Dolby Atmos track, and a bounty of archive supplements to the table as well, so there's plenty of good times to be had.