Film: Lucy
Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Amr Waked, Min-sik Choi, Analeigh Tipton
Director: Luc Besson
The tagline for Lucy goes like this: “The average person uses 10% of their brain capacity. Imagine what she can do with 100%”. Filmed in Taipei, Berlin and Paris, Luc Besson’s latest sci-fi actioner straddles the religious and scientific themes of transcendence and evolution with a strong woman as the central character who embodies Bacon’s famous phrase “knowledge is power”.
Paris is also called the City of Light and Lucy (meaning light or light bringer) shares her name with the oldest (3.2 million year old) skeleton (excavated in Africa) of a human ancestor.
“Please God help me,” the titular character begs as she is traumatised by goons employed by Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi) a low-minded drug lord with a penchant for high minded music (like, Mozart’s Requiem) Jang wants to know if the hapless girl knows more than she ought to about a certain briefcase. That’s the first, last and only time she entreats the godhead.
Used as a drug mule for a dangerous narcotic which leaks into her system, she mutates from nervy, unkempt blonde with chipped nail varnish into a sleek powerhouse of knowledge scaling walls, driving (without having learnt how to) reading minds and changing her appearance by merely thinking about it.
But can a woman who Lilith-like, refuses to acquiesce in her own victimization and desires limitless knowledge like Cate Blanchett’s character in an Indiana Jones instalment be allowed to flourish? No. Besson strikes a cautionary note on the human (or Luciferian) aspiration for god-like powers and uses stylized violence to demonstrate how Lucy’s brain capacity increases in increasingly dangerous scenarios.
But Lucy, as the viewer sees, is made of sterner stuff. She tracks down neuroscientist Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman) with a view to donating the knowledge permeating her being. We note Prof Norman waxing eloquent on Darwin’s theory, coolly ignoring as most scientists tend to, Darwin was proceeding on an assumption. But we’ll let that pass with the film tagline’s assertion which itself is inaccurate. Thankfully, Lucy manages, despite some illogical gaps in the narrative, to get the better of the criminals, with a little help from detective Pierre Del Rio (Amr Waked).
But she has also, in this time, lost all sense of fear, desire or pain. Unlike Johnny Depp’s Will Cadster in Transcendence who retains the complete range of human emotions, Lucy evolves into an emotionless creature. The fleeting kiss she plants on Capt Del Rio’s lips is intended as a souvenir for memory.
The final sequence in which her consciousness is downloaded into a computer is not as startling as previous scenes saturated with super sound and special effects covering the gamut from documentary footage of wildlife and psychedelic imagery possibly inspired by a Beatles classic referencing LSD to Renaissance art notably Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but with Lucy and a hominid substituting God and Adam. Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes/ And she’s gone/ Lucy in the sky with diamonds.
Ronita Torcato
ronitatorcato@gmail.com
