by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was one of the best modern movies
I’ve seen in quite some time: Lucy, a
2014 movie written and directed by Luc Besson (whose résumé includes credits
like La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element, Léon: The Professional — a movie Besson admitted strongly influenced this
one — and the surprisingly good and undeservedly little-known Angel-A) and based on the largely discredited but once very au
courant notion that human beings only use
about 10 percent of their brain capacity and the other 90 percent represents terra
incognita that could turn us all into
super-people if we ever figured out a way to tap into it. As I recall, this “we
only use 10 percent of our brain” business became really hip in the 1960’s when
proponents of LSD and other psychedelic drugs were saying that those chemicals
would help us tap into more of our potential brains than we’d been able to
manage au naturel. So it’s not
surprising that Besson’s script has the remaining 90 percent of his title
character’s brain opened up by a drug — specifically CPH-4, a chemical
supposedly released by mothers into the brains of their fetuses at six months
in order to hasten the final stages of intellectual capacity they will need to
cope with life outside the womb. A group of hellaciously unscrupulous Taiwanese
mobsters headed by one Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi) has figured out a way to isolate
this stuff and make it synthetically, and have accumulated enough to collect
four large plastic bags full of it and surgically implant each bag inside the
intestine of a person they’ve kidnapped and impressed into service as their
mules by researching their backgrounds, identifying all their loved ones and relatives, and threatening
retaliation if the poor pigeons don’t go along.
Lucy Miller (Scarlett
Johansson) is the slacker girlfriend of an even more obnoxious and useless
slacker, Richard (Pilou Asbaek), who’s charged with taking a locked metal
briefcase to Mr. Jang but wants to weasel out of it. So instead he gives Lucy
the job, and when she begs off he handcuffs the briefcase to her, thereby forcing her to comply or else face the entire wrath of the
Taiwanese Mafia on her head. She gets that anyway when they respond by taking
her into custody — as an example of her disorientation, none of her captors speak English and to communicate with
her they are relying on an interpreter who’s only a disembodied voice on the
other end of a computer phone connection. Things get even worse for Lucy when
Mr. Jang and his henchmen open the briefcase and we finally get to see what’s
in it — the four packets of CPH-4 — and when Lucy undergoes the operation she’s
put in a holding cell and chained to a wall, which gives the five male inmates
in with her the idea that they can take advantage of her, sexually and
otherwise, and she won’t be able to do anything about it. Only one of them
kicks her in the stomach repeatedly when she resists, and the kicks break the
plastic seal and release some of the CPH-4 into her system. Director Besson
intercuts all of this with shots of wild animals interacting — sometimes having
sex, but more often fighting (which made me wonder why he was harboring the
ambition to be the modern-day Dwain Esper — Esper was a sub-“B” filmmaker of
the 1930’s who made bizarre exploitation movies like The Seventh
Commandment, Narcotic, Maniac and Marihuana:
Weed with Roots in Hell, and one of his
favorite directorial strategies was to fill his movies with stock shots of
animals fighting, which was supposed to reflect symbolically the similarly
“animalistic” drives of his human characters) — and indeed the opening scene of
the movie shows an ape-man reaching out and pointing his finger at the sky,
followed by a dissolve to a city scene in which the action is sped up so the
cars pass back and forth at a blurry pace: I give him credit for having ripped
off both 2001 and Koyannisqatsi before his movie is even a minute old! The other
main plot line with which Lucy’s saga is intercut is that of Professor Norman
(Morgan Freeman), playing the eminence noir as usual, explaining the theory that humans use only
10 percent of their brain capacity (he says that that’s the highest among land
animals but dolphins use 20 percent) to a group of fellow researchers and
honors students at a seminar in Paris.
Needless to say, all that CPH-4 in her
system is going to turn Lucy (deliberately named after the nickname
paleontologists gave to the oldest known human fossil — a shot of the famous
statue of the prehistoric Lucy made to show their best guess as to what she
looks like of course appears in this film!) into the perfect confirmation of
Norman’s theories; she gains a bizarre assortment of superpowers, including
ultra-fast movement, telekinesis, the ability to surround herself with a force
field so bullets can’t harm her (an important ability since the Taiwanese
gangsters are after her big-time and trace her to Paris) and sudden insights
like the ability to drive a car and read Chinese. She commandeers a police car
assigned to officer Pierre Del Rio (Amr Waked) and drives it at an ultra-fast
pace, avoiding getting into any crashes herself but leaving a lot of wreckage
and mayhem in her wake — indeed, one of the most fascinating Zeitgeist aspects of Lucy is the heedlessness of both
the “good” and the “bad” guys to the collateral damage done by their actions.
All that tiresome Superman and Spider-Man nonsense about with great power coming great
responsibility is so 20th
Century! A movie made in the 1960’s about this theme — the first human who
unlocks more than 10 percent of their brain power — would probably have
presented the person sympathetically and made the villains of the piece the people
in the Establishment who didn’t want
people unlocking more of their brains because that would jeopardize their
ability to run things. The 2014 version presents Lucy as a rather shallow
heroine whose only apparent drive is her own survival — until enough of that
neural reprogramming kicks in that she realize her whole function is literally to kick-start human evolution, to send herself back
in time so she can touch fingers with that ape-man we saw in the opening
sequence (à la the famous Sistine
Chapel image in which Michaelangelo dramatized the Creation by having God touch
his finger to Adam to indicate He was giving him the spark of life, which is
actually shown in the film just so we get the point) — and by the end of the
film, which is periodically interrupted by titles showing us just how much of
her brain Lucy is using now (20%, 30%, 50%, etc.) she turns herself into a set
of black tendrils that plugs into the computers at the institute where
Professor Norman is giving his lecture, and ultimately she downloads all the
knowledge she’s acquired onto a flash drive and, when one of Norman’s
colleagues asks where she is, sends a text message to his cell phone reading,
“I AM EVERYWHERE.”
In a movie that has so reminiscences to other films — not
only the ones mentioned above (including the three films, one of them his own,
Besson copped to), but The Man Who Could Work Miracles (an H. G. Wells story in which a boring middle-aged
Englishman gets the power to have anything he wishes for happen, and the irony
is the contrast between the potential extent of his power and the stupid, banal
things he does with it), Flowers for Algernon a.k.a. Charly (the Daniel Keyes story, filmed with Cliff Robertson, in which a
retarded man undergoes an operation that turns him into a super-genius, only
the effect is temporary and by the end of the story he’s reverted to his
original intellectual level), David Brin’s 1991 novel Earth (in which a woman who’s done much of the research
and work to build up the Internet ultimately dissolves her consciousness into
the Internet and becomes the basis for the next generation of it), and even the
old joke about the scientists who built the ultimate computer, fed into it
every scrap of human knowledge, and decided to ask it all the questions humans
had been debating over the millennia of their conscious existence, so the first
thing they ask the computer is, “Is there a God?,” and the computer replies,
“There is now” — Lucy works
surprisingly well, managing the increasingly rare feat of being both an exciting shoot-’em-up action movie and a film of
ideas. Its only recent competitor in that regard is The Hunger Games, and the films in that cycle (of which I’ve seen the
first two, the ones that have made it to DVD so far) weren’t as effective at the
balancing act as Suzanne Collins in the book. As silly as some of the opening
scenes are, and as preposterous as the basic idea is (Universal put on a
10-minute bonus program attempting to establish a real-life scientific basis
for the plot, but you can regard the entire premise of Lucy as unscientific hooey and still enjoy the hell out
of it), Lucy is an excellent film
that benefits from Besson’s decision to keep the running time down to a mere 89
minutes. Probably a lot of modern-day moviegoers, brainwashed by the
hyperthyroid releases from most major studios to equate length with quality,
were surprised and disappointed by this film’s brevity, especially since it’s
carefully arranged not to invite
the possibility of a sequel (another unusual play I give Besson major points
for), whereas I loved its being so short and returning to the welcome brevity
of movies from the 1930’s and 1940’s. About the only thing I could fault Lucy for is that, for all its intriguing engagements with
issues of time, space, matter and energy, it’s still an action movie with a hot
young woman protagonist — as if Besson were recycling the premise of one of his
best-known previous films, La Femme Nikita, and giving Nikita super-powers!
