Film: Lucy

It is fairly common in the world of all things superhero to develop your powers through some outside source – whether it is an accident, assault or even a radioactive spider. And then we have Lucy. Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is a 25 year old student living in China who is somehow manipulated into becoming a drug mule for a particularly evil mob boss, played by Min-Sik Choi. The drug she is forced to carry internally is an extremely experimental synthetic creation designed to set the European party scene on fire. When the mysterious bag of blue crystals begins to leak inside Lucy she is quickly transformed into a kick-ass fighting machine with incredible logic and ability far beyond anything that has been seen in a human being before. We quickly find out that the drug has unlocked a level of brain capacity beyond which we are naturally capable of accessing, and as Lucy’s brain power increases, so too does the destruction in her wake.

Lucy is a film based on the idea that human beings only use 10 per cent of our brains. It is essentially an imagining of what might happen if more of our brain capacity was unlocked. While I believe the 10 per cent fact to be nothing more than myth, the film was still an entertaining 89 minutes that left me not only pretty satisfied, but also with the feeling that I may just have experienced some sort of group hallucination (in its stranger moments). If you can look past the slightly preposterous plot and accept that the film is what it is, you’ll find something that has some particularly thought-provoking dialogue and is stylishly filmed with, albeit some obvious, metaphorical imagery. Scarlett Johansson really pushes the action forward with some fantastic acting and Morgan Freeman (as a professor specialising in the brain) is likeable too – although we never really get to know him as much more than a kindly, intelligent man who tries to help Lucy as her brain power reaches breaking point. Lucy, in the end, wants nothing more than to pass on everything that she has come to understand through her arguably unfortunate experience and the idea that, despite being less (or maybe more) than human, her most primal instinct is still to help is a nice one.

While I wouldn’t rate Lucy up there as one of the best films of the year, the action/sci-fi/philosophical hybrid certainly held my attention, and is worthy of a cinema ticket.

Have you seen Lucy? What did you think of the idea behind the film?