![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Lucy (Review, spoilers)
Aug. 27th, 2014 09:39 amBack when I was younger and stupider, I briefly kept a diary. Of course I stopped pronto when I realised the folly of writing anything down where my family might come across it, but it lasted for about six months and, for one day, my diary entry simply read "Don't go and see Highlander 2 again."
As it turned out that written reminder was superfluous because the experience of paying actual money to see Highlander 2 in the cinema burned itself onto my cortex and there was no chance of me repeating the error. Some other films have had a similar effect - Robocop 3 and Ultraviolet spring to mind - and it is thanks to seeing these films that I can confidently pronounce that Lucy, the new sci-fi actioner starring Scarlett Johanssen, is not the worst film I've ever seen in the cinema. Indeed, it barely makes it into the worst five. The trouble is that's pretty much the best I can say for it.
The biggest problem Lucy has - and there are many - is that the scriptwriter thinks his audience is stupid, and isn't shy about making that abundantly clear. "Aha!", he's plainly thought, "This is science fiction, and people who like that sort of thing are thick. I'll need to talk down to them right from the start so they understand what is going on", and that's exactly what happens. We open with Lucy (Johannsen), a club-loving, happy-go-lucky exchange student in Taiwan arguing with her boyfriend of a week as he tries to persuade her to deliver a briefcase to a clearly dodgy contact as he doesn't want to do it himself. As this scene plays through, two things are happening - firstly, we cut, from time to time, to shots of big cats in Africa stalking an innocent, doe-eyed gazelle until, when she agrees, the cats bring down their prey and devour it; you know, in case you're a complete moron who can't infer subtext for yourself, and secondly we cut to Morgan Freeman who is playing a Serious Scientisttm who is giving a lecture in Paris* about what would happen if a human could access the power of their entire brain.
The average person, we're told, can only access 10% of their brain power. Freeman goes on to list a series of superpowers which someone who could access twenty, or forty or eight percent of their brain would develop, thereby outlining precisely what is going to be happening for the rest of the film and destroying any sense of drama or tension about what might be going to happen to Scarlett.
Incidentally, that '10% of the brain' thing is nonsense, as it makes no evolutionary sense. There's no way the body would carry around a large, energy intensive organ unless it used it's entire potential**. Imagine if it were any other part of the body which someone claimed you only used 10% of to understand just how nonsensical that is:
"The average person", intoned scientist Freeman, "Only uses ten percent of the potential power of their liver. Imagine just how much you might be able to drink if you could use one hundred percent"
A hand in the audience shot up. "Ah, I might be able to help with that one", said Monty.
Just to further insult the intelligence of the audience, at one point Freeman tells us that the human brain contains as many connections as there are stars in the galaxy and we immediately cut away to a shot of the galaxy as there's clearly no way you'd know what one of those looks like.
Anyway, back in Taiwan, Lucy's boyfriend is bloodily murdered in the street but nobody films it on their phone or calls the police like happens in real life, and she is kidnapped and has a bag of a new designer drug surgically implanted into her body so she can smuggle it through customs for the baddies. After a series of mishaps this bag bursts into her bloodstream and we discover to our amazement - or it would be amazement if Morgan Freeman hadn't told us this was going to happen ten minutes earlier - that this new designer drug allows her to access an ever-greater percentage of her brain.
Now, at first this is pretty cool. At twenty percent she develops incredible ass-kicking Black Widow-like powers and goes all ninja on a bunch of baddies, which I thought might make the film bearable but it doesn't last. By the forty minute mark she is up to 40% and can take over people's brains, manipulate gravity, and transform base matter into different states with the power of her mind.
For the remaining hour or so of the film, not much interesting happens. Imagine it as being like watching the Matrix but when Neo gets his superpowers there's no Agent Smith to challenge him so he just walks round doing super stuff to the general amazement of passers-by. Possibly the rest of the film might be better likened to watching someone playing Half Life on God mode; yes, occasionally baddies pop up and shoot at her and generally try to inconvenience her but for all the difference they make they may as well not be there at all. In fact, the plot of the rest of the film makes precisely zero sense as well as having no drama. Lucy is apparently motivated by getting her hands on more of the drug in order to boost her brain power to 100% and become a transcendent being of pure thought like they get in Star Trek***, but given that she can transform matter from one form into another at will why she doesn't just make herself a huge stack of the stuff out of nearby rubbish and plunge into it face first like Al Pacino at the end of Scarface I don't know. Instead she chases other drug mules to Paris where she hooks up with Morgan Freeman, a bunch of other scientists and a Parisian policeman who team up to hold off a bunch of heavily armed Taiwanese gangsters whilst Lucy gets on with expanding her consciousness to 100% so she can... can... can something. Whatever. I didn't much care by this point at nor will you. It turns out that when you can control 99% of your brain you can travel in time and space like you've got a brain-Tardis, but she doesn't bother going back in time and preventing the whole thing happening, she just goes and looks at dinosaurs and Red Indians and Lucy the aforementioned Australopithicine and then turns into a huge pile of red goo like Tetsuo at the end of Akira before becoming a being of pure thought, like Tetsuo at the end of Akira.
During this exciting**** end sequence the only role any of the other characters play is to say, out loud, what is happening on screen, like Sigourney Weaver in Galaxy Quest. When driving a police car pell-mell through the streets of Paris, the policeman is there to shout "You're driving too fast!", or when she turns into a pile of red goo and starts absorbing some computers, the scientists' role is to say, amazed, "She's absorbing the computers!" because not only are you, the audience, too stupid to understand context or plot, but you struggle to even summon up the wits to use your own eyes.
Now Morgan Freeman has form in taking any role whatsoever irrespective of quality for the paycheque but heaven alone knows how they convinced Johanssen to do this. I thought possibly Luc Besson had photos of her naked and threatened to release them on the internet unless she took the role, but then I realised those are already there so Lord knows what her motivation was. A big gas bill, maybe? As it is, Lucy is a mishmash of a whole bunch of better films; the Matrix, Limitless, Terence Malick's The Tree of Life, Akira and more, all mashed up and with all sense of threat, drama or tension removed.
I can live with films having a stupid core conceit so long as what happens thereafter follows logically from that. I can accept a man can fly and punch people through the moon, so long as the Superman film is enjoyable and holds together. I'm happy to believe that childrens toys come awake when I'm not looking and have adventures so long as I laugh like a drain from start to finish. I'm fine with the idea that a policeman can return from the dead in a robot body so long as there's drama, excitement, satire and genuine heart following from that. Lucy has none of those things. Not only is the core concept stupid - not inherently a bad thing in itself - but what follows is the worst sin I think a script can commit: it insults the intelligence of its audience. It thinks you're too stupid to be challenged, questioned, or to work anything out for yourself. In short, it leads you by the hand through a drama-free environment, pausing every so often for you to marvel at how much cleverer than you the writer is. And you know what? He's wrong.
*It has to be in Paris because the French are the only people who could listen the pony and trap he spouts and keep a straight face
**And I'd know, ladies. Oh, yeah.
***When I saw the title and plot of the film, my reaction was "Oh, that must be a reference to Lucy the australopithicine, postulated mother of the human race, and she must be going to be the mother of the next step in evolution". Of course it is; the script has told you that within three minutes of the film opening, because, you know, you're too stupid to work it out for yourself.
****LIE
As it turned out that written reminder was superfluous because the experience of paying actual money to see Highlander 2 in the cinema burned itself onto my cortex and there was no chance of me repeating the error. Some other films have had a similar effect - Robocop 3 and Ultraviolet spring to mind - and it is thanks to seeing these films that I can confidently pronounce that Lucy, the new sci-fi actioner starring Scarlett Johanssen, is not the worst film I've ever seen in the cinema. Indeed, it barely makes it into the worst five. The trouble is that's pretty much the best I can say for it.
The biggest problem Lucy has - and there are many - is that the scriptwriter thinks his audience is stupid, and isn't shy about making that abundantly clear. "Aha!", he's plainly thought, "This is science fiction, and people who like that sort of thing are thick. I'll need to talk down to them right from the start so they understand what is going on", and that's exactly what happens. We open with Lucy (Johannsen), a club-loving, happy-go-lucky exchange student in Taiwan arguing with her boyfriend of a week as he tries to persuade her to deliver a briefcase to a clearly dodgy contact as he doesn't want to do it himself. As this scene plays through, two things are happening - firstly, we cut, from time to time, to shots of big cats in Africa stalking an innocent, doe-eyed gazelle until, when she agrees, the cats bring down their prey and devour it; you know, in case you're a complete moron who can't infer subtext for yourself, and secondly we cut to Morgan Freeman who is playing a Serious Scientisttm who is giving a lecture in Paris* about what would happen if a human could access the power of their entire brain.
The average person, we're told, can only access 10% of their brain power. Freeman goes on to list a series of superpowers which someone who could access twenty, or forty or eight percent of their brain would develop, thereby outlining precisely what is going to be happening for the rest of the film and destroying any sense of drama or tension about what might be going to happen to Scarlett.
Incidentally, that '10% of the brain' thing is nonsense, as it makes no evolutionary sense. There's no way the body would carry around a large, energy intensive organ unless it used it's entire potential**. Imagine if it were any other part of the body which someone claimed you only used 10% of to understand just how nonsensical that is:
"The average person", intoned scientist Freeman, "Only uses ten percent of the potential power of their liver. Imagine just how much you might be able to drink if you could use one hundred percent"
A hand in the audience shot up. "Ah, I might be able to help with that one", said Monty.
Just to further insult the intelligence of the audience, at one point Freeman tells us that the human brain contains as many connections as there are stars in the galaxy and we immediately cut away to a shot of the galaxy as there's clearly no way you'd know what one of those looks like.
Anyway, back in Taiwan, Lucy's boyfriend is bloodily murdered in the street but nobody films it on their phone or calls the police like happens in real life, and she is kidnapped and has a bag of a new designer drug surgically implanted into her body so she can smuggle it through customs for the baddies. After a series of mishaps this bag bursts into her bloodstream and we discover to our amazement - or it would be amazement if Morgan Freeman hadn't told us this was going to happen ten minutes earlier - that this new designer drug allows her to access an ever-greater percentage of her brain.
Now, at first this is pretty cool. At twenty percent she develops incredible ass-kicking Black Widow-like powers and goes all ninja on a bunch of baddies, which I thought might make the film bearable but it doesn't last. By the forty minute mark she is up to 40% and can take over people's brains, manipulate gravity, and transform base matter into different states with the power of her mind.
For the remaining hour or so of the film, not much interesting happens. Imagine it as being like watching the Matrix but when Neo gets his superpowers there's no Agent Smith to challenge him so he just walks round doing super stuff to the general amazement of passers-by. Possibly the rest of the film might be better likened to watching someone playing Half Life on God mode; yes, occasionally baddies pop up and shoot at her and generally try to inconvenience her but for all the difference they make they may as well not be there at all. In fact, the plot of the rest of the film makes precisely zero sense as well as having no drama. Lucy is apparently motivated by getting her hands on more of the drug in order to boost her brain power to 100% and become a transcendent being of pure thought like they get in Star Trek***, but given that she can transform matter from one form into another at will why she doesn't just make herself a huge stack of the stuff out of nearby rubbish and plunge into it face first like Al Pacino at the end of Scarface I don't know. Instead she chases other drug mules to Paris where she hooks up with Morgan Freeman, a bunch of other scientists and a Parisian policeman who team up to hold off a bunch of heavily armed Taiwanese gangsters whilst Lucy gets on with expanding her consciousness to 100% so she can... can... can something. Whatever. I didn't much care by this point at nor will you. It turns out that when you can control 99% of your brain you can travel in time and space like you've got a brain-Tardis, but she doesn't bother going back in time and preventing the whole thing happening, she just goes and looks at dinosaurs and Red Indians and Lucy the aforementioned Australopithicine and then turns into a huge pile of red goo like Tetsuo at the end of Akira before becoming a being of pure thought, like Tetsuo at the end of Akira.
During this exciting**** end sequence the only role any of the other characters play is to say, out loud, what is happening on screen, like Sigourney Weaver in Galaxy Quest. When driving a police car pell-mell through the streets of Paris, the policeman is there to shout "You're driving too fast!", or when she turns into a pile of red goo and starts absorbing some computers, the scientists' role is to say, amazed, "She's absorbing the computers!" because not only are you, the audience, too stupid to understand context or plot, but you struggle to even summon up the wits to use your own eyes.
Now Morgan Freeman has form in taking any role whatsoever irrespective of quality for the paycheque but heaven alone knows how they convinced Johanssen to do this. I thought possibly Luc Besson had photos of her naked and threatened to release them on the internet unless she took the role, but then I realised those are already there so Lord knows what her motivation was. A big gas bill, maybe? As it is, Lucy is a mishmash of a whole bunch of better films; the Matrix, Limitless, Terence Malick's The Tree of Life, Akira and more, all mashed up and with all sense of threat, drama or tension removed.
I can live with films having a stupid core conceit so long as what happens thereafter follows logically from that. I can accept a man can fly and punch people through the moon, so long as the Superman film is enjoyable and holds together. I'm happy to believe that childrens toys come awake when I'm not looking and have adventures so long as I laugh like a drain from start to finish. I'm fine with the idea that a policeman can return from the dead in a robot body so long as there's drama, excitement, satire and genuine heart following from that. Lucy has none of those things. Not only is the core concept stupid - not inherently a bad thing in itself - but what follows is the worst sin I think a script can commit: it insults the intelligence of its audience. It thinks you're too stupid to be challenged, questioned, or to work anything out for yourself. In short, it leads you by the hand through a drama-free environment, pausing every so often for you to marvel at how much cleverer than you the writer is. And you know what? He's wrong.
*It has to be in Paris because the French are the only people who could listen the pony and trap he spouts and keep a straight face
**And I'd know, ladies. Oh, yeah.
***When I saw the title and plot of the film, my reaction was "Oh, that must be a reference to Lucy the australopithicine, postulated mother of the human race, and she must be going to be the mother of the next step in evolution". Of course it is; the script has told you that within three minutes of the film opening, because, you know, you're too stupid to work it out for yourself.
****LIE
