In the movie The Fifth Element, how do we realize that love is the only weapon that can defeat absolute evil?

The movie The Fifth Element makes us think about what are the most important values in life. Money, power, positivity, and more, but ultimately it shows that love is the essence of life and the only weapon that can defeat absolute evil.

 

Everyone only gets one chance at life, and no one wants to waste it. This is where prioritization comes into play, because life is also a limited time, and if prioritization is important, your life will be different depending on what you value first. In this blog post, I’d like to share my thoughts on what is the most important value, based on the old movie The Fifth Element.
If you were to ask someone what is the most important thing in life, they might say money. The power of money in the modern world is so great that it’s hard to ignore it, even if you want to. A close cousin to money is power. Power is something that’s built into society, and having power in society is a clear advantage for living a more comfortable life. However, money and power feel too worldly to pursue, even though people with some level of education recognize their reality and power. As South Korea went through the process of rapid industrialization and globalization, many people tried to live a comfortable life by pursuing these things, but many failed, and amidst the difficulties of the IMF, those who were bitter about money and power tried to live a truly happy life. So the value chosen by many people living in 2024 is none other than ‘positive mindset’. Books like The Secret by Rhonda Byrne and The Laughter Vitamin by Yoonhee Choi seem to convey the message that you can succeed in life with a positive mindset. However, the suicide of Yoonhee Choi, who was thought to be at the peak of this happiness, reminds us that a positive mindset may not be the best value.
This case reminded me of a movie I watched again, Luc Besson’s first science fiction film, The Fifth Element (1997), which is quite old, but I still remember watching it with great fondness and enjoyment. The message of love in this movie is one that breaks the perception that nothing can be absolutely the best in the postmodern era, and makes you think that love is a really important value.
The plot of the movie is not difficult to understand: the appearance of ‘Absolute Evil’, which will wipe out all life, is an unmanageable disaster for the people living in the futuristic society of 2259, but the ‘Mondowshawans’, who have prepared weapons for this purpose, return to Earth just in time for the appearance of Absolute Evil, but in the process, the Mondowshawans’ spaceship is crashed by the agents of Absolute Evil, and only one of their arms survives and is rescued.

 

 

After the crash, the surviving arm is regenerated into a ‘perfect’ woman thanks to advanced technology from the future. However, this woman (Lelouch) is not a Mondoshaan, but rather a key part of The Fifth Element, a weapon that is crucial to the operation of the weapon. The woman goes in search of a priest named Cornelius (Ian Holm), who has been asked by past Mondoshaans to pass on their knowledge, and in the process meets Coven Dallas (Bruce Willis). Coven Dallas is a former top federal agent, the last of his kind, who has retired and is now a taxi driver. He has a fateful meeting with Lilu and falls in love with her.

 

 

The weapons that the Mondosha’wans have installed on Earth are powered by the “elements,” which are four elements – water, fire, wind, and earth – that work when they surround a fifth element. These four elements are in the trusted hands of the Mondowshowers, but when the Federation learns of their existence and location, they summon the Coven back to retrieve them.
Eventually, the Elements are returned to Earth in the hands of the protagonists and the weapon is deployed, but despite its theoretical placement, the weapon fails to activate. However, when a wounded and skeptical Liru finds love through the Coven, the weapon does activate, stopping absolute evil and saving lives, with a happy ending.
Let’s go back to the scene before the weapon is activated: despite all five elements being in place, the weapon doesn’t work because the five elements need to be “opened” for the weapon to work. No one knows how to open the elements, which are propped up in stone, so they ask Lilu, who is The Fifth Element, and she says, “The wind blows, the fire burns, the rain falls…….. When everyone is stumped, a sigh blows into the stone representing the wind and it opens. The four stones are opened by the action of their respective attributes. Wind for wind, earth for earth, water for water, and fire for fire. When we see the elements arranged in this way, the concept of “opening” can be applied to the fifth element as well, and it is the love of Coven Dallas that opens the fifth element. If we take this “it is the element that opens the element” concept, we can see that the perfect, absolute good that the director is trying to represent in The Fifth Element is love.

 

 

Now that we know that the movie claims that love is important, let’s take a look at what kind of love the movie portrays. Assuming that none of the scenes in the movie are meaningless to the overall story because of the way the movie is structured, let’s try to assign meaning to some of the scenes.
The first thing that comes to mind is the perfection of love. When the main character, Koven, is on the phone with his friend, “Finger” (Koven’s friend) tells him to forget about his wife because there are many women in the world. To which Koven replies, “I don’t need millions of women, I just need one perfect woman.” The takeaway here is the way people are when they have someone they love. People who love someone often say, “I feel like I have the whole world.” It’s a strange thing to say, but it’s true: when you’re in love, every aspect of your life is perfect. How many times in the movie The Fifth Element is perfect, and if you translate that to love, you can substitute love for Coven’s “perfect” and come to the conclusion that “all you need is love”.
The second thing we can see is that love is irresistible. This is also seen in the phone call between Koben and Finger, where Koben tells Finger about his encounter with Lilu and says, “You know why……. A guest you can never refuse”. It’s hard to know what the idiomatic meaning of this phrase is in Korean culture, but knowing the ending of the movie, it’s certainly an apt description of love: externally, once love has begun, no amount of persuasion can stop it; internally, we’ve all had the experience of falling in love, even when we know we shouldn’t; and if you don’t have love for anything else, it’s almost impossible to resist the temptation of love.
The third thing we see is that love is more fragile than we think. The main character, Lilu, is very intelligent and a good fighter. She can fight dozens of mangalos and win with her bare hands, but she is injured with ridiculous ease by Zog. One of the things Coben says about Liru is, “When is he ever not in trouble?” While in the context of the movie, most of Coben’s encounters with Lilu have been crisis situations, it’s a very meaningful statement when you think about love. The easy way to think about love is between two people, but love is difficult because it’s not always a solo endeavor. At some point, we find our love faltering at the slightest doubt about the other person or a small flaw we don’t like. As strong and perfect as love is, it is also, paradoxically, fragile enough to vanish like a mirage at any moment. You see, when you’re hot with love, it’s a state that can drop like a cold stone at any moment.
Beyond the simple love story, the movie also has a lot to say about society. The first thing we see is a society that has lost sight of true love. The opposite of Coven’s claim that one perfect love is all that is needed is the idea of settling for any woman in the world. It is undeniable that marrying someone for the sake of enjoyment or background rather than true love is the reality of modern love.
The second thing we see is the disconnect in communication at home. In the movie, there is a character whose only voice is heard, and that is Koben’s mother. The reason she calls is because of the travel pass that Koben has gotten for his mission. It’s hard to go into detail here, but the conversation between Koben and his mother doesn’t seem very comfortable. If we assume that the scene that could have been deleted was made with an intention, it can be seen as the director’s accusation of distorted love in the relationship between parent and child.
The film is also a satire of the political system, the abuse of power, and commercialism wrapped in honor, but with all due respect, the film gives us a glimpse into the problems where the nature of love is broken. If you look at the types of love floating around the internet, you’ll find “eros,” the love between a man and a woman; “storge,” the love between family members; “philia,” the friendship between friends; and “agape,” the divine love and charity for humanity. The concept of philia was harder to find because it was thought of as friendship, but the rest of the love concepts were visible throughout the movie, and it shows the director’s sadness for an idealized society that has been distorted from its original form.
Now we need to restore that love, and it starts right next to us, not far away. In the movie, it was the love between Koven and Lirou that prevented the destruction of the world, suggesting that perhaps the change in the world starts with loving the “one person” right next to you. Many of the problems that modern society faces would be solved if love were restored within us, for the person next to us, for our families, for all of humanity. Of course, there are some problems that love alone cannot solve. Even in the movie, the elements of water, fire, wind, and earth were needed to make the weapon work, but the importance of love in bringing all of those areas together to make a complete weapon is undeniable, because it is people who make up society. I believe that love for others and other virtues, such as caring, are fundamental to any good solution. In other words, I believe that love must be at the center of any solution to society’s problems in order for the alternatives to be complete. Love for your lover, love for your family, love for your friends, and love for humanity……. I hope that we can abandon the selfish love that has been centered on each person and restore true love, and become a society where many people can truly enjoy happiness in such love.