Why in the hell would a heartless industrialist and killer have a cute and cuddly muppetish creature living in a compartment in his desk? It’s so incongruous with the character but it’s one of the details that I love from this scene, especially considering that we see him holding and petting the creature later in the movie. I love the random assortment of stuff that he has built into his desk. My favorite scene comes when he confronts the priest played by Ian Holm, and gives a speech about how life comes from “disorder, destruction and chaos.” He makes a convincing case that life is more interesting and people have more purpose when confronted with chaos, and that he is in fact serving life by creating destruction, however it’s never clear if he truly believes what he’s selling. He has a condescending view of pretty much everyone, including the mercenaries he’s hired to do his dirty work. In the scene after this one, he seems to enjoy the fact that the Mangalores blow themselves up with his weapons due to their own stupidity. He also clearly loves the weapons he makes, or at least is a good “used car salesman” type: When approached by a subordinate who suggests firing 500 cab drivers, he ups the number to 1,000 for seemingly no reason except that he feels like firing more people than necessary (resulting in the film’s hero being fired without warning). Zorg himself comes off as an odd combination of heartless and sadistic while still being surprisingly passionate. Zorg Industries has a wide range of interests, from weapons manufacturing to cab companies. Shadow”, who is pretty much the embodiment of pure evil. Zorg falls into the “evil CEO” brand of villain, though it’s unclear how he ended up working for “Mr. I don’t want to stereotype and say that the design is “very French”, but I would definitely say that it’s not the sort of image that an American filmmaker would craft for the villain of his/her big budget sci-fi film. He looks like he has his hair cut in a mohawk and then laid over to cover one side of his head, while the other half is covered in a strange plastic hat. Zorg stands out with his pinstriped suit, his extremely high collared shirt, and his soul patch, but what really sets him apart from a design standpoint is the craziness that is going on on his head. Much like with Ruby Rhod, Zorg is the perfect combination of writing, styling and performance that makes him hard to forget. Zorg would probably go in my top 10 most memorable film villains of all time. However, there’s one other character in the film that holds my attention every time he’s onscreen, and that is Gary Oldman’s villainous Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg. Last week in part 1 of my Friday Favorites devoted to characters from The Fifth Element I talked about how much I enjoy Ruby Rhod as played by Chris Tucker.
Welcome to “Friday Favorites” which highlight some of my favorite movie-related things.
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