Movie #23 - Lucy

Lucy is a new film continuing on the concept of 'what if we used all of our brain's capacity' which has been explored previously in the films Limitless and sort of in Transcendence as well.  The first thing you need to do to enjoy this movie is suspend disbelief, because the idea that humans only use 10% of their brain capacity has been proven to be a myth.  We use all areas of our brain on a regular basis and there is no area that cannot be damaged without impairing our performance.  Can we get smarter by training our brains?  Definitely, but the idea that we can increase 90% is false.  So, the idea is flawed but if you just go with it, this is a really fun ride.

Lucy is a young American girl (played by Scarlett Johanssen) studying in Paris and partying her time away.  She meets a guy in a bar who after a week, takes her to a hotel where he has to deliver a briefcase as a job.  He's too nervous though, and asks Lucy to do it, but she refuses.  He then handcuffs her to the briefcase and forces her to go inside and ask for Mr Jang.  When a bunch of dangerous looking gangsters emerge from the lift, you know Lucy is in a lot of trouble.  We discover that the briefcase contains a powerful new drug which is expected to become the new drug of choice.  In a nasty development, Lucy and a group of other unwilling participants have a packet of the drug inserted inside their bodies and are then sent to a different city of the world where they have to meet up with a distributor.  However, on Lucy's journey, she accidentally ingests the drug and things start to get pretty crazy as her brain increases in capacity at a rapid rate.

This is where the similarities between Limitless and Lucy start to end, because in Limitless the extra brain capacity is mainly used for personal gain, whereas Lucy has two missions in mind: revenge against the gangsters and sharing of the knowledge of what is happening to her with a scientist (Morgan Freeman bringing his typical gravitas to the movie).  What I really liked about this movie was the visual style.  It was written and directed by Luc Besson, the man who has given us such visual treats as The Fifth Element, Leon: The Professional and The Big Blue.   The visuals are kinetic and beautiful at the same time.  There is a lot of nature documentary style stuff inserted between scenes which seem designed to add more weight to the science of the film (even though we know it is actually not scientifically accurate).  One person at our screening thought they were in the wrong film during the opening scene of an early human drinking water at a riverbank, and given the timing of this film being released at the same time as Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, it's quite understandable!

What could have been pretty silly is just anchored enough by Scar-Jo's performance as a woman dealing with an extraordinary situation in a kick-ass way.  It is an interesting parallel role for her following her voice role in "Her" which both dealt with an expanding consciousness.  However, her playful, sexy character in Her is a far cry from the increasingly less human/business like revenge seeker in this film.   She's backed up well by Mr Freeman as usual.  Without them, this would have been dumb but for some reason I really liked it!