We watched “The Fifth Element” the other night, largely because it happened to be on TV, and none of those assembled seemed to be able to muster the strength to change the channel. A reasonably entertaining film, a tad on the cheesy side, but likeable enough. I remember, though, how thoroughly disappointed I was the first time I saw it. This was some time ago, when I was only mostly bitter and jaded, and, noting that it had been an awfully long time since anyone had attempted anything remotely like a serious science fiction film, I harbored a secret hope that, someday soon, somebody in Hollywood would awaken to the near limitless possibilities opened up by the explosion in computer-aided special effects, and would put all that expensive expertise to some truly imaginative use. Alas, Bruce Willis and Luc Besson were not that someone, even if the film DID have the odd glorious outburst of inspired production design.

The problem was one of expectation. The opening minutes seemed to promise something …bigger. Before the story settled into standard stoic- hero- battling- set-chewing- villain, Bruce-Willis-shooting-up-a- cruise-ship territory. I thought, for a few minutes, that I was going to see something epic, original, perhaps even intelligent, perhaps moving…exploring big questions the way sometimes only truly good fantasy can. I thought I was going to see something I’d never seen before, be sucked into a new and intricate world for two hours, one that I would reluctantly drift out of as I wandered back onto the street, forgetting, for a while, the mundane land we actually inhabit.

It was that film, that imagined film, that I wanted to see. That sweeping drama hinted at by the prologue and the rapid jumble of exotic images that constitute the trailer. Built of unknowns, mysteries awaiting discovery, possibilities…the undefined, the stuff around the edges, just eluding a clear grasp.

Likely, no film Luc Besson could ever complete, in a final, fully exposed form, could hold a candle to it.

Italo Calvino wrote If On a Winters Night A Traveller, about, sort of, a man who reads the first chapter of a novel, and keeps searching for the remainder of the book, only to continuously find different first chapters to different novels. A whole book of beginnings with no endings, all promise with no letdown, (but no satisfying resolution, either) opening limitless imagined stories to the reader, but locking none of them into place.

A good beginning is hard, but not as hard as bringing a good beginning all the way through to a good ending. Beginnings are exciting, because they are new, they introduce new things without necessarily having to explain them, put them in context, or flesh them out. They can be full of mystery, leaving one wondering what’s coming. And what I imagine is coming, in all its tantalizing vagueness, is usually far cooler than what actually plays out.