I think what's really interesting visually about the film is that the urban environment looks extremely population dense, kind of grimy, and lived-in, but it's not played for dystopia points or to show things are bad. It doesn't have that fascist aesthetics of "the future is clean and perfect and streamlined" or "NY in the 70s but with computers" that a lot of sci-fi falls into, it's somewhere in between. The apartments are shitty shoeboxes, the airport seems to be full of garbage, and there's crime, but it's not shown to be horrible.

Bruce Willis' character gets food from the flying Asian noodle vendor and it's just treated as something people do, eating out of your window because there seems to be nothing at ground level.

Idk what my point is, I just think it's a different kind of futuristic film that doesn't follow contemporary visual shorthand that showed the future as either 100% clean cut and beautiful or what westerners thought Kowloon walled city was: a lawless hell hole of urban density.

Kinda funny how that image was supposed to be dystopian and these days it almost makes me feel hopeful. They fucked it all up, but at least they got their shit toegther at some point to build new infrastructure and housing and invent flying cars and so on

I think it was supposed to be a flawed utopia, I can't find it now, but I think POS Luc Besson or someone else said that the backstory was that Earth was in a cold war, and then they discovered space travel and peace came to Earth and a large part of the universe. I guess racism and other things were solved thanks to space travel, lol.

There was supposed to be more lore around sea levels dropping and the flying car that justified the vertical New York presented in the beginning.

See that makes more sense than what I thought, which is that weird sci-fi trope of stacking skyscrapers such that they form whole undercities, which never seemed like an especially good use of real estate to me, dystopic conditions notwithstanding

I think I read somewhere the earth had exported a lot of its water, possibly to Phloston Paradise? Hence the lower levels

After some further research, it seems like it might actually be a digital painting, so it sort of is CG? I'm not very familiar with the terminology, http://www.vfxhq.com/1997/fifth.html has some details and mentions "digital matte paintings", but I'm not sure what's the difference between a digital matte and a typical CG background is. Maybe something to do with the rendering technology used, I dunno.