Fahrenheit 451

lot of the details of The Fifth Element are pretty vague. Okay, so there's some kind of Big Nasty Thing out in space, and it's evil, and it shows up every 5,000 years to try to destroy everything. A race of friendly aliens have cooked up a way to stop it, using four talismanic stones representing earth, fire, air and water -- plus the key item, the mysterious Fifth Element. Normally, these five objects are stored on Earth. But when World War I is about to break out, the aliens decide their treasures aren't safe, and so they nab them for safekeeping.

Cut to Generic Dystopian Far Future #11, where people live in sterile, automated cracker-boxes and drive their aircars through breathtakingly crowded skies. The Big Nasty has shown up, right on schedule, and so has the spaceship bearing the Fifth Element.

But lo and behold, some rubbery Little Nasties (who look a lot like the dog-goblins from Ghostbusters) blast the helpful ship out of the sky. A human scientist manages to recover it, reconstruct the Fifth Element as a beautiful woman (Jovovich), and dress her in a few revealing scraps of cloth before she comes to her senses, remembers her mission and runs for her life. Enlisting the nearest smirking, stubble-chinned Regular Joe (Willis) to help her, she sets out to recover the stones and (cue the exclamation points) save the universe!!!!!

Space opera with a cyberpunk backbeat

All in all, this is a pretty goofy film. Technically, it's a fight between a glowing pyrotechnic special effect and Bruce Willis, who sports all the personality of a speed bump. Gary Oldman corners the personality market as a truly incompetent baddie who pushes the Big Nasty's kill-'em-all agenda for some unknown reason, but he doesn't manage to come across as much of a threat. In fact, nothing in the film is ever really scary except -- briefly -- the benevolent Mondoshawan, who created the Fifth Element in the first place.

In fact, Element is more of a comedy than anything else, although it draws obvious themes and visual images out of "serious" action/SF films from Total Recall to Blade Runner to 12 Monkeys. Like them, this is an intensely visual movie, heavy on the eye-candy. Writer/director Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita) reportedly had $90 million to play with, and most of it clearly went into elaborate costumes, lavish effects and humongoid, attention-glomming battles and