Further Thoughts on "Lucy"

Earlier this week, I released a movie review for Lucy.

I expect to often release two reviews of the movies I watch.

I’ll release the first review right after I watch a movie so as to give my readers a snapshot of how I felt immediately after the experience.

I will occasionally release a second review after I’ve spent some time to reflect on what I witnessed. My second review of Lucy follows.

I won’t bother here to reiterate the movie’s plot. If you’re unfamiliar with Lucy, feel free to read my first review that regards it. You’ll discover that review on this same blog.

I would like, for this second review, to discuss the biblical points of view that Lucy offered.

In this movie, our protagonist, Lucy, discovers that the drugs she absorbed will eventually kill her. She’s destined to die.

If she can endure her situation long enough, she can give humanity a gift (in this case, scientific knowledge, rather than spiritual salvation) that will improve its existence.

Morgan Freeman’s character refers to Lucy’s quest as “her sacrifice,” lest the audience not make the biblical connection.

The audience even watches Lucy travel back in time and perform a parody of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” when she touches fingers with one of humanity’s primitive ancestors.

Luc Besson, writer and director of Lucy, drives home the correlation with the final scene, where Lucy announces, via another character’s cell phone screen, that she is, despite her apparent death, “everywhere.”

The warning against humanity seeking “forbidden knowledge” or “playing God” does not make its presence in this movie, much to my approval. While Besson could’ve easily traveled that route, he instead braved the shakier path.

Lucy tells her audience that knowledge cannot stand as evil. However, people possess the capacity to use knowledge for dark purposes.

As the late George Carlin pointed out in his standup, “There are no bad words, only people who use them for bad purposes.”

We might even apply this to porn (yes, I’m going there). Nudity and sex cannot exist as sexist or objectifying (porn, like words, like knowledge, remain nonliving and unaware of themselves, and therefore pursue no objectives). However, people in the porn business can choose to run it in shady fashion. People can choose to use porn to justify sexist beliefs and/or objectifying behaviors.

People choose how they wield knowledge. Knowledge does not wield us. This might serve as the most supreme, spiritual message, universal to all beliefs.

While that might not have served as the main moral premise of Lucy, I consider it one of its most profound messages, intended or not.

(You can catch my short stories at martinwolt.blogspot.com for free! And check out my novels on Kindle! See you next week!)

Lucy

I didn’t want to review an easy call for my first post. We know Guardians of the Galaxy proved a wonderful, imaginative movie, while the new Spiderman and Ninja Turtles . . . well, we know how those went.

Instead, I saw the movie Lucy.

Lucy is your basic Bad Guy (sometimes, but not in this case, Satan) gives Good Guy (sometimes, but not in the case, Nicholas Cage) powers only to have Good Guy turn them against Bad Guy.

Scarlett Johansson’s character, Lucy, discovers herself kidnapped by drug lords, who cut her open, fill her with a packaged, experimental drug, and use her as a suitcase to sneak those drugs overseas.

The package tears open and the drugs leak into Lucy—only to grant her godlike abilities and knowledge.

Besson makes two points in this movie. That time remains the ultimate currency, and that knowledge doesn’t lead to corruption unless people steer it in that direction.

However, it would’ve worked better if Besson demonstrated these points more often via his plot, rather than have his characters explain it to his audience.

The story rides tracks made often of metaphors and rarely, despite its science fiction identification, on anything remotely scientific.

If you can’t cast aside your most basic, scientific knowledge while you suspend your disbelief, you’ll discover this story somewhat indigestible.

While the drug dealers provide the plot device necessary to kick-start everything, I found them afterwards entirely out of place in this otherwise philosophical storyline.

Lucy nearly corrects this problem when, early on, she’s about to kill the drug dealers . . . and then doesn’t.

Lucy doesn’t express the slightest remorse when she harms the drug dealers. She possesses all the ability in the world to do so. Yet, she walks away, knowing that they’ll make trouble for her down the road.

There’s no reason for Lucy’s mercy, other than to shoe-slide a few future car chases and shootouts into the film.

Granted, without the drug dealers, the movie quickly suffers a lack of conflict. However, Lucy gains superpowers such that the drug dealers haven’t a prayer to defeat her. They consequently provide distraction, rather than suspense.

Besson could’ve fixed this several ways. Most obviously, he could’ve slowed Lucy’s power crawl.

Better yet, he could’ve had Lucy kill the drug dealers the first chance she had, and then moved the movie forward to focus fully on its second storyline (a bit episodic, but I believe it would’ve worked).

Besson would have needed a new problem, had he gone that last route. Lucy even states at one point, “I feel no pain, no fear, no desire.”

Our main character has no desire? If she desires nothing, what’s her goal?

Rather than use the drug dealers to fill this void (they posed no real threat to our main character, anyway), I wished Besson had focused more on Lucy’s struggle to digest what she can suddenly understand and perform via her miracle drugs.

The movie missed opportunities to build its characters, as well. I walked away knowing almost nothing about any of these characters. I know what a few of them did for a living, and I knew that Lucy served as a student of some sort. That’s about it.

Even when Lucy discusses past memories, she supplies only the most vague, such as the time she pet a cat, or the taste of her mother’s milk.

All the time that the movie wasted with out-of-place car chases and explosions could’ve gone towards a conflict more central to the movie’s moral premises and backstory for the characters.

I overall enjoyed this movie. I felt genuine fear and injustice for Lucy when the drug dealers kidnapped her. I cared that she escaped. I wanted the drug dealers to die.

If I care about the characters (underdeveloped as they stood), then the storyteller did something right.





(You can catch my short stories at martinwolt.blogspot.com for free! And check out my novels on Kindle! See you next week!)