On the morning before I saw this film I received an image on my Facebook newsfeed. It was of Gaza. An old Arab man, wailing in despair, was holding something aloft for the camera to capture – for the world to see.
It was the corpse of a child, charred black from an explosion. Her legs had been blown off. It reminded me of the photograph of that little Vietnamese girl running naked from her village – terrified and uncomprehending – after it had been scorched and obliterated by napalm.
Tears welled in my eyes. When will it ever end?
A few hours later, sitting joyless and bored beyond salvation among an audience that cheerily guzzled jumbo Cokes and stuffed their faces with popcorn as Scarlett Johansson ever so sexily blasted the brains and guts out of the bad guys in yet another sci-fi blockbuster, I could not help but wonder … what has caused the disconnect between the reality of carnage and the mindless consumption of it as entertainment?
Scarlett plays Lucy (she’s back to being a blonde) who, after an abduction scene that involves a display of panting and whimpering that is embarrassing even by amateur theatre standards, is forced to be a drug mule for a really nasty Oriental crook.
The contraband chemical (it resembles the blue meth that Jessie and Walt manufactured in Breaking Bad) turns her into a super-powered, omnipotent, time-travelling, god-like hornbag.
Morgan Freeman is in the mix doing his usual wise-old-codger thing and Amr Waked, as the tough detective, is a sort of French Jason Statham (you can’t go wrong with a stubbled stereotype).
There is probably meant to be a reference in the title to the Beatles’ classic song from Sgt Pepper’s, but if that is the case it’s only a desperate act of self-glorification.
As for director Luc Besson’s pretentiousness and insistence on tarting up psycho-babble as profundity, his lamentable movie is in the same league as Terrence Malick’s risible The Tree of Life.
~ John Campbell
Reading the review was more painful than to watch the movie that’s for sure… Thanks for letting us know Scarlett is back to blonde, that’s priceless information. Anyway… “Lucy”, as well as “Tree of Life”, are some of the best movies I have seen in the recent years. Few movies have been able to give an idea, a felt perception, a taste, of the divine, the beyond, the unspeakable. I understand it can be very challenging for some people to sense the depth of these movies. Treated without due regard, they end up in the “spiritual” or “religious” bin, with all the other challenging ideas and people that are giving the left-brain-minded peeps a hard time putting reality in a box. “Lucy” has moved me deeply. It is a reminder of the great power that comes with realising that we are much more that what we have been told we are. That life is a mystery, a majestic game in which we agree to play, small or not. Knowledge of self or “repopulating one’s brain” as the key to immense power. “Lucy” was way beyond my expectations, as I haven’t really enjoyed any of the movies Luc Besson directed after “The 5th Element”, but this is a masterpiece!
I also recently watched ‘Lucy’ at the cinema. I have never been a fan of violent movies, actually, I have never been a big fan of movies in general. Despite this, I personally found ‘Lucy’ to be one of the few movies which have opened my perspective and really touched me. Obviously if you focus on the negative aspects of anything that is all you will see, but there is always more than one side to a story. All that is required is a perspective shift. Past the violence there was an underlying message regarding human consciousness and mind expansion. The extraordinary potential of the human mind is beautifully highlighted. If you have an interest in expansion and have explored the depths of your own mind and heart through meditation, psychedelic experimentation, astral travel (or what ever floats your boat), you will come to realize that there is so much more depth to what we are experiencing here on Earth than what meets the eye. This movie filled me with a sense of relief, that the message is being spread, that important knowledge is being passed on. We all interpret information differently and of course we do not all gain the same insights from the same experiences. I would usually be critical of a violent movie like this, but this time the positive messages out weighed the negative, in my view. ‘Ignorance brings chaos, not knowledge.We’ve codified our existence to bring it down to human size, to make it comprehensible, we’ve created a scale so we can forget its unfathomable scale.’