Lucy (2014)
Directed by Luc Besson
A woman, accidentally caught in a dark deal, turns the tables on her captors and transforms into a merciless warrior evolved beyond human logic.
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Lucy is like 2001: A Space Odyssey meets The Tree of Life for Dummies, lots of flashing on nature footage of, say, a cheetah with its scared herbivore prey, in case you missed out on how Lucy, before she got supercharged, was like a little soft baby doe about to get fanged by a nasty predator.
The director seems to want these interpellations to convey the scene's universal resonance, rather like the prologue to 2001: A Space Odyssey or that trippy creation sequence in The Tree of Life.
If you’ve always wanted to see “2001: A Space Odyssey” remade as a Eurotrash action film starring Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman and the guy from “Oldboy,” with all the ass-kicking, car chases through Paris and special effects – along with the entire history of the universe, “Tree of Life”-style – packed into 90 minutes, then your ship has come in.
The title refers not only to the main character but also to the famous fossilized skeleton, an ancestor of Homo sapiens; Besson implies that both represent the birth of a new species, turning this enjoyable shoot-'em-up into a dumbbell 2001: A Space Odyssey.
These episodes are indebted to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” film adaptations of H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” and, more recently, Terrence Malick’s time-tripping “The Tree of Life.”
Obviously inspired by Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam,” Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and Neo in “The Matrix” franchise, Besson even takes the name Lucy from the fossilized skeleton of man’s earliest ancestor, Australopitchecus afarensis, which was discovered in 1974.
— sometimes playing like Limitless remixed by Godfrey Reggio.
You will never shake the fact that "Lucy" is a borrowed concept from films like "Limitless" and "Transcendence" and anime classics like "Akira."
…fantasy on the order of 2011's Limitless .
He makes no bones about ripping off other movies (“D.O.A.,” “The Time Machine” and “Limitless” come quickly to mind), nor is he shy about throwing a wrench into the mechanics of quality filmmaking.
Then again, Besson probably got the idea by opting to use only 10 percent of his own noggin to make this movie, as the accomplished writer-director of The Fifth Element and La Femme Nikita doesn't seem especially interested in presenting anything particularly memorable with this concept — even Bradley Cooper's so-so Limitless, a 2011 offering with a similar plot, provided a bit more food for thought than Lucy.
It’s an even wilder ride than what we’re used to seeing from Besson in what amounts to a rather artsy film that’s a sort of “Limitless” combined with “The Tree of Life.”
If Besson has crafted a less memorable twist on The Matrix, Lucy is also, for what it's worth, a far less self-important film.
Obviously inspired by Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam,” Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and Neo in “The Matrix” franchise, Besson even takes the name Lucy from the fossilized skeleton of man’s earliest ancestor, Australopitchecus afarensis, which was discovered in 1974.
Giddily recycling everything from “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Matrix” to yakuza actioners and National Geographic documentaries, it’s a garish, trippy, wildly uneven and finally quite disarming piece of work, graced by a moment-to-moment unpredictability that will pique audience curiosity but may put off those who prefer their summer movies on the more conventional side.
Sections may remind you of the original "The Matrix" and the last hour of "Akira," and the final ten minutes play like a Greatest Hits of science-fiction "trip" movies.
Johansson plays Lucy as a mouthy hanger-on who’s transformed into a ninja Carrie White in The Matrix.
The result, however, looks similar, with fantastically blossoming black goo sucking up computer info, gobbling everything in sight, and kicking us around various parallel dimensions, including a quick tribute to the white-space dimension of “The Matrix.”
He also loads up with visual oddities of the cosmos and human prehistory, like an amped-up recut of Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life."
These episodes are indebted to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” film adaptations of H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” and, more recently, Terrence Malick’s time-tripping “The Tree of Life.”
A valiant if ultimately futile attempt to graft a brainy mind-bender onto a traditional action film template, Luc Besson's Lucy frequently comes across as The Tree of Life as directed by Michael Bay.
Like some demented combination of "Taken" and Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life," "Lucy," the latest from Luc Besson, is a full-out action movie - and a sober rumination on the nature of existence.
Terence Malick could conceivably have been drafted to take a whack at Lucy’s final minutes, which bear some resemblance to The Tree of Life as well as 2001.
That scene manages to cobble together 2001 (1968), The Tree of Life (2011), Altered States (1980), the Sistine Chapel ceiling (reconfigured with Scarlet Johansson and the Australopithecus Lucy) — and more.
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Johansson channels Robert Patrick’s T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day as Lucy’s mind accelerates at the speed of light.
Sliding into theaters between Aliens ’ Ripley and Terminator 2 ’s Sarah Conner, Nikita is transformed, over the picture’s running time, from a comatose junkie into a fast-moving, fast-thinking killing machine; she’s quite literally unconscious in the picture’s first shoot-out, but her three years of training make her into a ruthless, powerful government assassin.
It’s not every day (hell, every year!) that a Terminator 2 , The Matrix or Inception delivers that trifecta.
(When the bag-rupture first happens, she goes full Fred Astaire in “Royal Wedding,” rolling up the walls and across the ceiling.)
At first, she's walking up the walls and onto the ceiling like Fred Astaire in "Royal Wedding," but soon she becomes focused.
I don’t mind that this drug allows her to writhe up a wall and across the ceiling as if Fred Astaire was having a seizure in Royal Wedding .
This releases the CPH4 into her system, turning her eyes purple and forcing her to re-enact Fred Astaire's "Royal Wedding" dance on the walls and ceiling, but in excruciating pain.
As Lucy's body and mind are rapidly evolving, her individual cells want to fall off on their own – bits of her start flying away in the airplane washroom – and she knows she has about 24 hours to stay alive, which makes this one of those time-ticking movies like Crank or Speed .
Various moments pulsate with fragmented possibilities, alternately channeling the adrenaline-fueled “Crank” movies, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and “The Matrix,” never achieving their greatness, but capturing tidbits of its DNA.
Faltering none from its breakneck pacing and mind-opening cosmic grandiosity for a full 90 minutes, the film might best be described as a cross between 2006's adrenaline-fueled action pic " Crank " and 2011's existential Terrence Malick tone poem " The Tree of Life ."
The director just doesn’t give up, huffing and puffing away with a mad-dog determination until the film’s grand finale arrives, so overwrought, visually turgid and downright loony (like a blend of 2001: A Space Odyssey , The Tree of Life and Crank – on acid) that I questioned whether even he remembered his original intentions.
These episodes are indebted to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” film adaptations of H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” and, more recently, Terrence Malick’s time-tripping “The Tree of Life.”
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Of course, it is those later sequences that set the film apart from similar stories such as Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon (filmed as Charly ) and Alan Glynn’s The Dark Fields (filmed as Limitless ).
This story is also somewhat similar to the great Daniel Keyes science fiction short story and novel, “Flowers For Algernon,” which has been made into plays, movies and even dance performances.
I’m less good with why she doesn’t just go all Amy Irving on Mr. Jang and explode him like John Cassavetes in The Fury (1978), rather than wait for him and his endless stream of goons to shoot up Paris.