It's The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec, it was made by the insane French director Luc Besson (which is probably why it's nuts), it's on TUBITV, and I watched it a couple of years ago because Jeffery Overstreet told me to.
Just what the doctor ordered: A feast of Friday night escapism. Globe-trotting adventure, over-the-top comedy, extravagant costumes, Egyptian tomb-raiding, and a rampaging pterodactyl.
Luc Besson's The Fifth Element remains one of the strangest of space-fantasy films... like a great grandchild of Star Wars that wanted to be Blade Runner, Die Hard, and Spaceballs all at once. Its highs are so dazzlingly high, and its lows ... well, there aren't any lows. There are only tangents. Really, really bizarre tangents.
If there's been anything lacking on the big screen in recent years, it's fun. And this may not amount to more than the sum of its genre-crazy parts, but it felt like seeing a glorious big-screen rendition of one of the stories I wrote when I was a kid. And for that, I'm grateful.
He's absolutely right. It's a ton of fun, it doesn't really add up to more than the sum of its parts, and it's exactly the kind of thing my kids write. (The film itself is based on a series of comics by the French comic artist, Jacques Tardi, whose works served as the foundation of another crazy film of the recent past, April and the Extraordinary World.)
The year is 1912. A 136 million-year old pterodactyl egg, housed on a shelf in the Natural History Museum, has mysteriously hatched, unleashing a prehistoric monster onto the Parisian streets. But nothing fazes Adle, when she finds a connection with the ancient bird and reveals many more extraordinary surprises...