The Fifth Element (1997)

In 1997, Luc Besson spent $90 million on a movie about a New York cab driver, a supreme being in thermal bandages, and four elemental stones that spend the entire runtime in the wrong hands. It made $264 million. That's The Fifth Element, and it's Nic's pick, partly because the show had somehow gone this long without a Gary Oldman movie. Nic saw it several times in theaters in '97 because he worked at one, quoted it into the ground with his high school friends, and still remembers a buddy reading the poster tagline aloud as "it must five it be found." Steve saw it once, found Chris Tucker aggressively annoying, and only warmed up to it years later in college, roughly the same way he eventually made peace with the Bob Hoskins Super Mario Bros. movie.

Most of the episode is two dads trying to describe things that resist description. The benevolent aliens are giant turtles, or possibly something Gary Larson drew, waddling around because their spacesuits won't let them raise their arms. The Mangalores are just the pig guys. Zorg wears a plastic plate on his head that covers no wound and serves no purpose, so it has to be fashion. Jean Paul Gaultier did the costumes, which explains the flight attendants but not the cops, who land somewhere between Judge Dredd and the sumo suits from a corporate team-building retreat. The background population of the future consists entirely of overweight cops and supermodels, a world Nic diagnoses as "the King of Queens universe."

Then there's the nitpicking, which is half the fun. Steve cannot forgive Zorg for flying away from Flohston Paradise without ever opening the case, and Nic points out that he doesn't leave a Taco Bell window without checking his bag. There is a phone book in the 23rd century. Human skin, according to the film's scientists, is grown by blasting a body with slightly greasy solar atoms. Nic's wife Jeannie clocked that the match meant to save all humanity had obviously already been struck, and this was after she watched the diva's concert dissolve into a firefight, turned to him, and said, "I'm sorry, I hate this."

Leeloo Dallas, multipass.