The Fifth Element

Besson started the story at sixteen and had a four hundred page draft by 1991, the year he hired comic artists Jean Giraud and Jean-Claude Mézières to build the world. The result behaves less like a screenplay than a sketchbook: the apocalypse mythology is dispatched in one early scene and never reopened, while the running time goes to architecture, air traffic and fabric. Gaultier alone produced nine hundred costumes for Fhloston Paradise. That is the bargain. Anyone who wants the plot examined gets it early, then watches the film walk away. The second break arrives with Chris Tucker. Ruby Rhod was written for Prince, whose tour schedule made him unavailable, and from Tucker’s entrance the volume climbs so steeply that the calm first hour and the shrieking second barely belong to one picture. At ninety million dollars it was the costliest European production to that date, spread over seven Pinewood stages, and the Egyptian prologue was shot in Mauritania. For: viewers content to let design outrun story. The Diva sequence welds an aria from Lucia di Lammermoor onto a techno beat, and knowing that Inva Mula sang the notes separately for digital assembly changes those three minutes. Not for: anyone expecting space combat, because the last half hour stays inside a hotel corridor and on a concert stage.