It’s hard to believe, but Luc Besson’s beloved film The Fifth Element just celebrated its 27th anniversary earlier this month. The wacky sci-fi adventure remains a pillar of the genre thanks to its uniquely weird vision of the future and standout performances by Milla Jovovich, Gary Oldman, Bruce Willis, Chris Tucker, and Ian Holm. If you’re looking to revisit the movie, a new limited reprinting of The Fifth Element 4K steelbook edition with special hand-drawn box art will be on sale for just $30 (was $46) during Memorial Day Weekend. This is the perfect chance to add the movie to your 4K Blu-ray collection–but if you don’t need the slick box art, other editions of The Fifth Element are even cheaper.
$30
This 4K edition of The Fifth Element comes with the gorgeous cover art seen above (don’t worry, the “LIMITED EDITION REPRINT” sticker isn’t on the steelbook case itself). This release has a decent-sized set of bonus features, including a couple hours of behind-the-scenes featurettes and a new interview with director Luc Besson that’s exclusive to the 4K editions. In addition to the 4K disc, there’s a standard Blu-ray edition and digital copy included.
$18.50
This set is functionally identical to the one above–meaning it has all the same special features and video quality, but you can save a few bucks by missing out on that slick steelbook cover. If you’re just trying to get a great-looking copy of the movie and don’t care about box art, this is the edition you want.
$12
If you’re not equipped for 4K, this standard Blu-ray is the disc for you–this is literally just the second disc from the 4K editions sold separately, which means it’s got all the same extra features as those sets aside from the 4K-exclusive interview with Besson. Despite being only 1080p, this version of the film was transferred from the 4K master, so it looks stellar.
If you’re a sci-fi fan but haven’t seen The Fifth Element, you owe it to yourself to pick up one of these Blu-ray editions while they’re on sale. The story follows a far-future taxi driver, Korben Dallas (Willis), who becomes the unwitting guardian of a strange young woman (Jovovich) on the run from crazed scientists, violent aliens, and worse. The film draws heavy inspiration from the expressive French sci-fi comics of the 1980s, even tapping the late Jean “Moebius” Giraud and Jean-Claude Mézières–two of the most prolific French comic creators of all time–for production design and concept art. The film oozes charm and style that few other films have ever replicated. Even Besson’s later works like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, which crib from similar stylistic and thematic inspirations, didn’t quite recapture the magic of The Fifth Element.
