History Headscratchers / TheFifthElement

*** Well, at some point between that scene and the "present", the Mondoshawan make explicit contact with Earth.

** Ruby ''Rhod'' is identified as "he" at least once (by one of the flight attendants, I think) and he isn't crossdressing - thats simply what happens if you tell Jean-Paul Gaultier to create an over the top costume for a character without regard for sanity, usefullness or common sense.

* Truly I hate to ask, as I'm sure I missed something, but what gender is Ruby Rhod in-universe? Are we actually supposed to take Ruby as a female or as simply a male who cross-dresses to an extraordinary degree?

*** I was taught to avoid delivering yes and no questions since while you're expected to get a better answer, if you give someone the opportunity to answer in one word, they will likely take it. Granted, Korben was a really boring guest.

** ''Resistance: Fall of Man'' has a un with exactly this feature, and it is ''awesome'', though granted the enemy are quite hard to kill anyway.

** Speaking as someone who does interviews, it's entirely possible, and even expected, that a "yes or no" question will be answered in a much more elaborate manner. Technically, "Did you enjoy the trip?" for example, is a yes or no question, but it'd be reasonable to expect the answer to be more along the lines of, "Yeah, the service was great, and I really loved the scenery from my window seat."

** It wasn't just his yes/no answers, but his uninspired delivery of them. So long as he sounded like he was bored and hungover it wouldn't have mattered how interesting his answers were, they'd have made for lousy radio.

* Ruby Rhod complains that Korben isn't a good interviewee because he only answers with simple yeses and nos. But the questions he's asking are yes or no questions. What did he expect? Not to mention how difficult it must be to understand Ruby talking so fast. Which brings me to wonder how Ruby's a successful talk show host in the first place.

** Because those massive, several foot thick doors '''crushed''' him.

* The Mondoshawan that gets stuck in the temple in the prologue. Why can't they just open the door again and get him out once his hand gets stuck in it? Why do his compatriots leave without so much as a second glance behind?

** I'd say it's probably a combination of the first and third. It's implied that his firing is a result of Zorg getting rid of staff from his subsidiary companies, and since the process is certainly automated (how many was it? One million?), the computer probably was programmed to fire the "worst" employees. It checks his license, and bam. As for the Colonel, he probably only noticed as he was doing a background check on Korben for the mission (and the fact that he was unemployed may have contributed to them choosing him). It's the future, his information was probably updated the moment he was fired.

* Why exactly did Korben lose his job? It seems to me there were three possible ways. Zorg's henchman suggests they lay off employees from the cab companies, so there's that. A second possibility is that the Colonel who offers Korben the mission had him fired as an incentive to take the mission. That's why he knew about it so fast and brought it up. Korben even seems a little skeptical about it. Finally, it makes sense that Korben would lose his job once it became known that he'd used up the last point on his driver's liscense.

** I think mainly because there's no other way to get around the city. You could build a city in such a way, but it's much too late for that now, they'd have to reconstruct Manhattan from the ground up. But look at the establishing shot of NYC and just how much has been added to the city in terms of height. It's probably far from perfect, but then tens of thousands of people die every year from ground car crashes and it's a sacrifice we make without thinking twice. No reason that a perceived/actual necessity should be so different.

** In this case, it just seems to be that kind of dangerous future. Anywhere you go, someone might have some kind of deadly future machinegun and kill you. The shuttles are infested with alien cling-ons.. That's why the police are so rabid. The cleaning robots in Zorg's office looked pretty unsafe too.

* Flying cars: This just bugs in whatever I see in in. What would be practical purpose of flying vehicles manned and owned by average people in a densely populated urban area? Especially when people jump off of a building could cause a multi-vehicle pileup (plane crash?) destroying both air cars AND buildings.

** She was a RubberForeheadAlien. Humanoids have two holes that go straight into their bodies. In a female's case, there's three(depending on definition).

* Alright, so 99% of this movie just runs joyfully on the MST3KMantra. I'm fine with that! But the dual point that I just cannot wrap my head around is A) how on earth Plavalaguna ingested those stones in the first place, and B) how on earth she was planning to get them out again, if she hadn't been [[spoiler: fatally shot]]. Can her species unhinge their jaws? What gives?

** It depends on how much he charges each customer, doesn't it?

** It might be that Korben is a favorite customer, and that's why he stuck around, or why he was right there in the first place. He might've been finishing up a run on the entire apartment building and stopped to chat with his last custmer before heading off. Or he might spend some days anchored to a busy intersection. You see him for all of five minutes, hardly enough to see his whole business model.

The ZF-1 replay button. Why would you want to shoot in the same spot again? If there was someone there, you already shot them. If you missed, you'll just keep missing.
* Armor. Maybe there's some armor in the future that needs multiple shots to get through, breaking through would be easier if you can hit the same spot. Though otherwise... a useless function

*** Or, an ambush. You happen to know a busload of enemy are about to come from a certain spot (through a doorway, for example) and they'll be packed in rather tight. Fire one round at the area you want to point your Dakka towards, then hunker down behind cover, wait until they show up, and spray away like a madman, filling the air with lead, without ever exposing yourself to enemy fire.
**** Also, that feature would be very useful for covering fire, without the shooter doing the covering having to aim the same spot all the time or even expose oneself to return fire. And maybe there are options to spread the bullets around the same spot to cover more effectively.

* It struck me that the flying restaurant boat guy has a really lousy business model. He's one guy who delivers food by flying his entire restaurant from place to place and sticking around long enough to make smalltalk with his customers. Realistically, he wouldn't be able to serve enough customers to keep his business going.

** She didn't just stumble on the entry for War. She ''deliberately'' typed out "WAR". This implies that she had some idea of it already; but seeing all of it condensed together like that is more of what put her into HeroicBSOD territory.