Jean-Baptiste

Emmanuel

Zorg

Zorg was the primary(ish) villian in the movie The Fifth Element. Portrayed wonderfully by Gary Oldman. He walks with a limp (and one of his feet makes a metallic clink when it hits the floor), and speaks with an interesting, southern-like (American) accent.

His main focus in the movie is to gather the 4 elemental stones, representing Earth, Air, Fire and Water, and deliver them to Mr. Shadow, who is in actuality a planet sized ball of evil. Mr. Shadow wants the four stones because they - in combination with the Fifth Element - contain the power necessary to stop the Shadow's mission to destroy life. All life. Zorg explains his philosophy of destruction to Father Vito Cornelius (Ian Holm) in a meeting they have:

Life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder and chaos. Take this empty glass: here it is, peaceful, serene. Boring. But if it is ... destroyed. (glass shatters, robots enter to clean it up) Well, look at all these little things - so busy now! Notice how each one is useful. A lovely ballet ensues, so full of form and color! Now think of all the people that created them, technicians, engineers, hundreds of people who will be able to feed their children tonight so those children can grow up big and strong and have little teeny-weeny children of their own and so on and so forth. Thus adding to the great chain of life. See, by creating a little destruction, I am, in fact, encouraging life.

Kind of shaky if you ask me. But Zorg is the most powerful, not to mention ruthless, businessman on earth, owning many corporations (including arms manufacturers, and the cab company) and no doubt believes that he can capitalize on the destruction by using his businesses in the ensuing reconstruction effort. He seems to miss the fact that if all life on earth is destroyed, there will be no reconstruction. He does, however, recognize that people think he's evil and accepts this with a rather grim humor. When Fr. Cornelius calls him a monster, he simply replies, "I know".

An interesting factoid is that even though Zorg is the main bad guy in the movie (second only to the vague Mr. Shadow), he never meets Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis), the main hero in the movie, face to face. They came close once, as Korban runs into an elevator as Zorg comes out of another one, but that's as close as they get to each other.


I'll tell you what I do like, though, is a killer. A dyed in the wool killer. Cold-blooded, clean, methodical and thorough. Now, a real killer, when he picked up the ZF-1, would have immediately asked about the little red button on the bottom of the gun.

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