Unlike some film reviewers, I won't spoil your movie-going experience by revealing the entire plot of The Fifth Element. Luc Besson tried very hard to keep the story under wraps while filming it. He didn't want to spoil the film's sense of wonderment and surprise. Those are powerful ingredients at work in Fifth Element, and there's no sense in destroying them. Suffice to say that Bruce Willis plays a down-on-his-luck cab driver in 23rd Century New York City who, by a strange twist of fate, is called upon to save the universe. Seems that four ancient devices (and a mysterious "fifth element") are required to fight off an evil alien force that appears every 5,000 years to wipe out the universe as we know it. It's up to a reluctant Bruce to gather the elements together and save the day. Can he succeed? What do you think?

Some may be turned off by the film's lack of "hard" science fiction. In the era of ID4 and the upcoming Men in Black, serious sci-fi is looking like a genre that hasn't seen a significant contribution since Blade Runner (which, as a box office failure, didn't exactly encourage the studios to produce more of the same). Don't go into the theater expecting 2001: A Space Odyssey; The Fifth Element's only agenda is entertainment. There are moments that tread heavily into the territory of fantasy (particularly with Element's all-encompassing, universe-destroying "evil" much more akin to The Neverending Story's "Nothing" than to the concrete evil of a Darth Vader). Besson, being a good Frenchman, grew up on the illustrated sci-fi fantasy of Metal Hurlant magazine (known in America as Heavy Metal). Anyone familiar with that magazine's dense graphic look and imaginative flights of fancy, will take to The Fifth Element like a duck to water. We've got flying taxi cabs, alien mercenaries, interstellar space flights, space age opera singers and some really big explosions.

The film's visual effects are far beyond eye-popping. From its crowded cityscapes to its outer-space battles, Besson set out to create a holistic, fully-realized environment like the one portrayed in Blade Runner. Whereas filmmaker Ridley Scott "based" his trend-setting film on the designs of famed French illustrator Jean Giraud Mobius, Besson went right out and hired the man himself. The result is a mad extension of today's crowded world--towering city blocks, cramped cookie-cutter apartments, wall-to-wall traffic. It's certainly the best adaptation of Mobius' stunning comic book work ever put on the big screen. Top that off with some smashing costume design by none less than Jean-Paul Gaultier, and you've got several Academy Awards locked down come next spring.

One of the film's most pleasantly unexpected elements is its liberal dose of humor. The script (from Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen) gets progressively crazier and progressively sillier. It reads, for the most part, like a pop art parody of some old Alfred Hitchcock spy thriller: Heroes, villains, femme fatales and enemy agents all running around like mad searching for a mysterious McGuffin object. By the time Chris Tucker arrives as the fast-talking sexoholic disc jockey Ruby Rhod, things have gone overboard in a glorious, delirious way. Any movie where Gary Oldman is not the weirdest character on screen has got to be pretty flipped out.

Suspend just a little sense of disbelief and enter this wigged-out world for some high-tech, high-energy entertainment. I guarantee you'll never know what's waiting around the corner for you. Most summer blockbusters try to be a roller coaster ride. The Fifth Element throws in the whole damn amusement park.