Now if this doesn't sound like a story dreamed up by a teenager, nothing does. The Mangalores are in the hire of the sinister Zorg ( Gary Oldman), who supports the evil force despite the fact that (as nearly as I can figure) it would destroy him along with everything else. Involved with mankind in this approaching battle are two alien races: the Mondoshawan, who live inside great clunky armored suits (that was their hairy pineapple), and the Mangalores, whose faces can be pictured by crossing a bulldog, a catfish and an alderman. The pulsating fireball in space is the physical manifestation of the dark force. Every 5,000 years, a portal opens between the universes where these two forces live the evil force can slip through unless the five elements are correctly deployed against it. Arrayed against her is a vast anti-life force, a sort of black hole of death. The 'fifth element'' of the title, we learn, is the life force itself-that which animates the inanimate (the other four elements are earth, air, fire and water). Soon the future of the universe is in their hands, as the movie unfolds the rest of the story. She leaps, but is saved from dashing her genes out on the pavements far below by crashing through the roof of a taxi driven by Korben Dallas ( Bruce Willis), who seems to have been ported directly here from the cab in ' Pulp Fiction.' Leeloo holds unimaginable powers, but she needs help, and Korben befriends her. She breaks the glass, grabs a general's privates, and dives through what looks like a wall of golden crumpled aluminum foil, racing outside to a ledge high in the clouds. Military-industrial types want to employ Leeloo for their own ends they observe her from behind unbreakable glass. Leeloo is clad in a garment that looks improvised from Ace bandages but gets no complaints from me (the costumes are by French couturier Jean-Paul Gaultier, whose favorite strategy as a designer is to start by covering the strategic places, and then stop). Ian Holm plays an astrophysicist who significantly observes, 'It is evil-evil begets evil.'' What is this object? What rough aliens are slouching toward Earth in its wake? And how to stop it? Man's hopes may lie with Leeloo ( Milla Jovovich), cloned from a single unworldly cell, who comes into existence with flaming red hair already dark at the roots (those cells remember everything).

'All we know is, it just keeps getting bigger,'' one scientist reports. Meanwhile, Earth is threatened by a giant pulsating fiery object that is racing toward the planet at terrific speed. Towers climb to the skies, but living conditions are grungy, and most people live in tiny modular cells where all the comforts of home are within arm's reach. It looks like Flash Gordon crossed with those old Popular Mechanics covers about the flying automobiles of the future. The futuristic metropolis, constructed at enormous cost with big, detailed models and effects, is wondrous to behold. But 'The Fifth Element'' cuts quickly to another extraordinary scene, New York City in the mid-23rd century. The stones are not safe on Earth anymore.'' Deep portentous opening omens almost invariably degenerate into action sequences. Four crucial stones, representing the four elements, had been kept here until a spaceship, looking something like a hairy aerodynamic pineapple, arrived to take them away, one of its alien beings intoning in an electronically lowered voice, 'Priest, you have served us well. Inside an ancient tomb, scientists gather at the site of an event that took place (we learn) centuries earlier. The movie begins in 'Egypt, 1914,'' that birthplace not only of civilizations but of countless horror and occult films.

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