Review: 'Lucy' hits its mark, even if it's not a bullseye
Posted Tuesday, January 20, 2015 at 3:46 PM Central
Last updated Tuesday, January 20, 2015 at 3:47 PM Central
by John Couture
There is so much that I love about Lucy.
Director Luc Besson is back directing a strong female protagonist.
Scarlett Johansson is understated and shows much needed restraint in her character which is very promising.
Morgan Freeman is the man. Duh.
Even the story is interesting and persuasive enough to trick me into believing it for 90 minutes.
And yet, despite all of these great things, I was left wanting more at the end. Don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed the film, but unlike most films these days, I wanted Besson to take time to meander through the mind of Lucy as she tries to understand and comprehend the changes that are going on inside of her.
The simple story is that Lucy is a bohemian type from America vacationing in Taiwan who gets into some trouble thanks to a newish boyfriend. Suddenly, she's unwittingly turned into a drug mule for a new synthetic drug when she wakes up to find that she's undergone some not-so-cosmetic surgery. While in transit, the drug baggie tears, spilling the drug into her blood stream. Instead of overdosing, the massive amount of the drug allows Lucy to start using the full potential of her brain.
From here on out, there will be spoilers, so if you haven't seen Lucy and you don't want to spoiled about the film, I would turn around and return after you have seen it.
If there's one theme that runs through the entire film, that would be unrealized potential. The story, while flawed, is still compelling enough to allow the audience to suspend their disbelief just enough to go along with it. The problem is that they never take the film anywhere.
The entire film takes place over the course of say 24 hours or so, which is fine, but it really doesn't leave much room to explore the various nuances of the story. First, you create a dramatic conflict by putting the mule's families in danger and then you exploit that for an odd phone call that Lucy makes to her mother and yet, there is no follow up there.
There's the scene with her roommate (played by my new fave Analeigh Tipton) that feels so rushed and out of place, but it's probably the last time that we see Lucy's humanity. From that point on, she is consumed by whatever it is that she's becoming. This Omega Woman is something that is perhaps more robotic than human.
This brings up a great chance to explore this idea. When does Lucy lose her humanity? Is the fact that we don't use the full potential of our brain what indeed makes us human? Is there a balance? Is Lucy the next step in evolution or is it more than that?
These are all very interesting questions that I think would have added so much to the film, but instead Besson chooses to pack in more bullets and car chases. Don't get me wrong, they are important and serve to drive the action and build suspense, but they don't do much in terms of moving the story forward.
It's like Besson had a cornucopia of interesting ideas and instead of fleshing a few of them out, he just threw them all into the film to see what sticks. Take Lucy's kiss with the French Inspector, was that her attempt to see the feasibility of propagating her knowledge to the next generation or simply an excuse to insert a kiss into a film that otherwise didn't have one up to that point?
Think about it, instead of the very anti-climatic ending where Lucy downloads her existence into a fat zip drive, what if, through that single kiss, she is able to impregnate the Inspector with their child who will truly be born as the next step in evolution? She can control and manipulate cells and structure, so it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility to believe that she could impregnate a man and download her knowledge into those clump of cells.
Obviously, that ground-breaking idea could be disastrous in the wrong hands, but I trust that Luc Besson would give it the seriousness that it would require. It would also set up a sequel in which Morgan Freeman can do more than the part he's drawn here which basically is a glorified narrator responsible for dumping massive amounts of exposition onto the audience.
Enough with the flaws, there was plenty to like about Lucy too. As I mentioned Luc Besson is brilliant when it comes to strong female protagonists. He's responsible for La Femme Nikita, Leon and The Fifth Element. When it comes to action/sci-fi and female badasses, there's no one better behind the camera than Besson.
In Lucy, he directs ScarJo into a subtle performance that is really reined in. While sure, at times, I would have wished to get more of what was going on with Lucy, I think the way they played it probably works best with the material. ScarJo's best moments are towards the end when she's sitting in Times Square and she starts rewinding time.
This opens up some pretty interesting theological and philosophical discussions as not only is she there (and responsible?) for the first human Lucy gaining consciousness, but she's also able to observe the big bang. These are weighty questions and I was hoping that Besson would address them, but he leaves it for the audience to wrestle with.
Again, normally, I'm ecstatic when a filmmaker allows the viewer to fill in the blanks, but with so much lost potential already unrealized in the film, I was truly hoping that they would seize upon this and flesh it out a bit.
One aspect that I really enjoyed was at the beginning when they intercut images of a gazelle and lions hunting it into the scene of ScarJo being "hunted" by Mr. Jang's thugs. It was a nice parallel between humans and animals and really set the film into action. Sadly though, this was quickly dropped and never fully realized.
The blu-ray itself is a combo pack that includes not only the Blu-ray, but also a DVD and UV digital version of the film. This versatile combo pack is a great value to the consumer who then has the option to view the film in whatever way is convenient to them at that time.
There are two featurettes included with the Blu-ray, "The Evolution of Lucy" and "Cerebral Capacity: The True Science of Lucy." The first feature is a standard film extra that interviews the cast and Luc Besson about the development and production of the film.
It took nearly ten years for Lucy to see the light of day from initial conception to release and it's very interesting to get some background on that process. Also, the added thoughts from the stars and director go a long way in filling the holes that the film left unfilled.
The second feature is pretty interesting in that it directly addresses the single most absurd thing about the plot, that humans only use 10% of our brains. While many neuroscientists debunk this myth, the fact remains that we are not currently using the full capacity of our brains and that by activating other areas, we may develop powers much like Lucy. It's a pretty compelling argument not to quibble in the numbers, but to simply accept that humans have yet to reach their full potential.
If there is one slight oddity that bugged me it was how Universal blatantly manipulated an image of Scarlett Johansson from the film when they used it for the back cover of their Blu-ray. As you can see below, the left image is what they have on the back cover while the other image is the exact same shot as it appears in the film.
I realize that we live in Photoshop world, but Luc Besson made the conscious decision to dress Scarlett Johansson in a black bra and a white tee shirt and yet, they bleached the image so as not to show the bra on the artwork. Is the shirt a metaphor for the change that is taking place inside of her making her old skin transparent? A metaphor that will be shown in graphic detail later in the film courtesy of an airplane's bathroom.
I'm sure I'm blowing it out of proportion, but this was just something that irked me a bit. Do we really live in a world that needs to be shielded from seeing the outline of a black bra under a white shirt? I'm sure that's a discussion for another day.
All in all, if you like a good brain-free action flick, then Lucy will certainly fit the bill. If you're looking for a little more science in your sci-fi, you might want to pass on this one. As I said, the film raises a lot of potentially interesting questions and discussion points, but they just never follow any of them down the rabbit hole.