The futuristic city with flying cars at the beginning of the movie definitely has all the cyberpunk visuals, and technically Zorg is the head of an evil corporation. But the real villain of the movie is incoming force of evil/darkness. And the plot is resolved through the power of love. Even the President of Earth is actively trying to help do the right thing and save the planet.
While there are some great cyberpunk visuals at the beginning of the movie, I don't know if the themes are there to call this cyberpunk. What do you think? Would you consider The Fifth Element to be cyberpunk?
It's not not cyberpunk.
It's close enough and shares enough of the same things to be analyzed as part of the genre.
I do think that to a large extent the big evil bowling ball of doom is supposed to abstractly represent capital or something adjacent.
Things like the depiction of the indigenous resistance movement as unsophisticated dupes and terrorists merits analysis; why did the French director depict them this way? How can this be a reflection of French colonial history? Same with the depiction of the white Archeologists and the presumably middle easter kid subjected to colonialism in the beggining though I think there's less there.
Leelu can be analyzed through the "born sexy yesterday" trope and there's a lot of questions to ask from a Feminist slant.
The movie actually acknowledges some of the harms and contradictions of capitalism, while underplaying others. Showing the relationship between Corben as a cabby working for Zorg and ultimately being one of the people who thwarts Zorg is nice.
The decision to never have the protagonists and the antagonists directly interact is a neat one and opens up some very good questions about narrative norms - turns out the hero doesn't actually need to confront the villain!
It does have a lot of cyberpunk themes; mighty and powerful corporations and governments can't save themselves so they need a working class guy and his weird buddies to save the world. The upper classes are depicted as a gaggle of decadent idiots who have no idea what's happening, while the corporate leader is a hyper-competent bastard who completely understands all the harm his sytem causes and loves it.
And it's also just a silly adventure film with lots of style and cool visuals and a sappy power of love resolution.
Been a while since I've seen it, but one thing that I'm remembering differently than a lot of folks in this thread is that I don't remember it being outright dystopian. Sure, evil corp and all. But Earth government isn't really evil, the arts are still cherished, and while life seems hard it seems more like a dysfunctional society than a dystopia. Just my take though (and doesn't address OP's question).
My fun anecdote is that maybe 10 years back I got a free LaserDisc player. The local library happened to have The Fifth Element on LD, so naturally I rented it. You had to request media at the front desk, so I wrote down the call number and he returned with a very confused look --- "you know this is LaserDisc, not DVD or Blu-ray? Like, it's...really big." Not the same quality as Blu-ray, but was definitely more fun :)
I'd say it's more of a fantasy story in a cyberpunk setting. There are cyberpunk elements, but I don't really think the story itself is exploring any of the anti-capitalist or transhumanist themes of cyberpunk, just using them as a background.
