The Fifth Element

Luc Besson built The Fifth Element from two sources simultaneously: Jean-Claude Mezieres's French comic series Valérian and Laureline, which he had Mezieres himself adapt visually for the screen, and Fritz Lang's Metropolis, which provided the structural blueprint for the vertically stacked future city and its class-based architecture. Besson documented this explicitly in interviews. The film is a conversation between European comics, German Expressionism, and 1990s action cinema.