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"Lucy" by Luc Besson: Film Review

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Words: 514 |

Published: Jul 17, 2018

Words: 514 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited:

• Bayley, D. H. (1994). Police for the future. Oxford University Press.
• Gilling, D., & Pawson, J. (1985). Crime, poverty and the environment. Longman.
• Kelling, G. L., & Coles, C. M. (1996). Fixing broken windows: Restoring order and reducing crime in our communities. Simon and Schuster.
• National Institute of Justice. (2015). Understanding property crime. Retrieved from https://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/property-crime/Pages/welcome.aspx
• National Police Foundation. (2017). Police corruption: An analytical look into police ethics. Retrieved from https://www.policefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/An-Analytical-Look-into-Police-Ethics.pdf
• O’Reilly, T. (2016). Security camera system design and implementation for industrial and commercial applications. Wiley.
• Pease, K. (1998). Repeat victimization. Criminal Justice Press.
• Rosenbaum, D. P., & Lurigio, A. J. (1994). Crime and the economy. Sage Publications.
• Smith, D. A., & Jarjoura, G. R. (1988). Social structure and criminal victimization. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 25(1), 27-52.
• Wilson, J. Q., & Kelling, G. L. (1982). Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety. The Atlantic Monthly, 249(3), 29-38.

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Imagine a stranger-in-a-strange-land revenge thriller about a wide-eyed Anglo bombshell ( Scarlett Johansson ) who gets kidnapped and abused in Taiwan by nasty, sweaty, shouting Korean gangsters and then escapes to seek justice. Then imagine this same movie starring, say, a lightning fast kick boxer who can knock a dozen opponents' teeth out before they can raise a single fist. Now imagine this same movie injected with a dose of apocalyptic science fiction, with the woman gaining strange powers as the story unfolds. Then envision midnight-movie touches mixed into the filmmaking: flash cuts of predators and prey enhancing otherwise typical scenes of plans being hatched; monologues about brain capacity and the true meaning of time coupled with psychedelic visions and wormholes and explanatory objects materializing from thin air. 

That's Luc Besson's "Lucy," a thriller about an American woman who gets kidnapped into service as a drug mule bearing an experimental synthetic hormone, accidentally absorbs some of it, then sheds her physical, intellectual and perceptual limitations. I could describe five or six other kinds of movies that in some way also echo "Lucy." 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. You've seen a lot of the individual situations and filmmaking techniques in "Lucy" as well. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to identify one idea, scene or element in the picture that is not a cliche.  

But the total package feels fresh. From the minute that Johansson's title character suffers a beating in captivity that ruptures the drugs in her stomach and releases them into her bloodstream (a Yankee nightmare), the film enters a realm of continual delight, though not always surprise. There's no point naming any of the other major characters, as there really are no other characters, only types: the arrogant fat-cat drug dealer ( Choi Min-Sik ) who thinks he can control the short blond drug mule and learns the hard way that he can't; the brilliant, deep-voiced scientist ( Morgan Freeman , who else?) whose theoretical studies of the human brain's untapped potential make him an information source and then finally a kind of partner-savior to Lucy; the handsome nice-guy Parisian cop ( Amr Waked ) who assists Lucy during her climactic mission to acquire more of the experimental hormone to ingest and become whatever it is that she's becoming: a 1950s sci-fi monster, probably—the kind that cannot be killed because everything you shoot at it makes it stronger and hungrier.

Lucy is little more than a type herself—a representative of humanity in its un-mutated, non-super state. Johannson's mid-career transformation from husky-voiced ingenue to intensely physical matinee idol is one of the more fascinating arcs in American cinema. It's only her control over her body, voice and eyes—and maybe our awareness that her performances in this movie, " Her " and " Under the Skin " are all of a piece; Lucy even uses the phrase "under the skin" at one point!—that stops "Lucy" from being tiresome. Her work keeps us from realizing that Besson's script has botched the chance to tell a deeper story, one that's not just bombastically exciting and superficially clever, but quietly tragic.

"Lucy" starts with shots of the prehistoric ape-woman Lucy and periodically returns to her throughout the story, not-too-subtly comparing the heroine's transformation to that of the species itself ("from evolution to revolution," to quote one of the script's more pungent phrases). And yet there are only two moments that make us really understand and empathize with Lucy as something other than a cipher who represents the un-evolved human. One is an early scene of her being terrorized and abused by Taiwanese drug thugs: Lucy's abject helplessness here is hard to watch. The other occurs deeper in the story when Lucy realizes she's about to embark on a terrifying and probably one-way transformative journey and phones her mom. The scene is shot mostly in tight closeup. The dialogue has a goofy Proustian boldness: "I remember the taste of your milk in my mouth ... I want to thank you for a thousand kisses that I can feel on my face." 

That scene is so brazenly powerful that in retrospect it made me wish the main character had gone on a journey with more emotional gradations. Heck, I'd have settled for more than the two that Besson deigns to give us: "Oh, my God, these guys want to kill me" and "I am God, watch me kill these guys." When the hormones enter Lucy's bloodstream it's as if a switch has been flipped. The heroine starts speaking in monotone and tilting her head at looming men like a quizzical bird regarding a worm that it's about to devour. She's woman-as-Terminator. The Terminator is a great movie monster, but there's a reason why it's a supporting character in the films that bear its name.

Like many films by Besson—" The Professional ," " The Fifth Element ," " The Messenger " and other high-octane shoot-'em-ups—"Lucy" starts out riveting but becomes less engaging as it goes along. It keeps introducing potentially rich narrative veins and then failing to tap them. It too often falls back on gunplay and gore just when you think it might finally delve into the notions that it keeps serving up with such fanfare (the falseness of the idea of uniqueness; the self-defeating nature of a species "more concerned with having than being"; time as "the one true unit of measure").  

Nevertheless: "Lucy" is a fun, confident work. It's fast and tight and playful even when it's sadistic and violent, which is often. It lasts about 90 minutes and change but feels longer in a good way, because every second is packed tight. It's full of itself, yet it still keeps winking at you. It wants to be taken seriously, but not so seriously that you don't laugh at (and with) the sight of Lucy strolling into a gunfight wearing nosebleed heels, or making enemies writhe like marionettes on invisible strings. The movie is alive. It pops. 

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

Lucy (2014)

Rated R for strong violence, disturbing images, and sexuality

Scarlett Johansson as Lucy

Morgan Freeman as Professor Norman

Choi Min-Sik as Kang

Analeigh Tipton as Caroline

Amr Waked as Pierre Del Rio

Cinematography

• Thierry Arbogast

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Lucy summary and analysis of "lucy".

A full year has passed since Lucy arrived in the United States. She reflects on the changes that have occurred since then. She sees herself then and now as two separate people. Before, Lucy was a simple girl who wanted to conform to convention, become a nurse, and obey her parents and the law. Now, Lucy is in the process of inventing herself, still becoming aware of who that self is.

Lucy then begins to sort out what she does and does not know about herself through a series of recollections. During an embarrassing conversation with a woman who had visited her homeland, Lucy realizes that even though her family has lived on the small island for generations, she has never really seen more than a quarter of it. Upon further contemplation, she recognizes that the only history of the island she knew was that of its colonization by the British. Lucy contrasts this present awareness of colonization with her experience as a child. As a young schoolgirl, Lucy disliked the British for superficial reasons like their looks, clothes, and choice of music. At the time, she wished to be ruled instead by the French.

At this point, Lucy defines the past as "the person you no longer are, the situations you are no longer in." She summarizes some of the main changes that have occurred within the past year. Mariah , once perpetually happy, is now sad, since Lewis has left her for Dinah , Mariah's best friend. Lucy no longer lives with the family. She decided to leave after the news of her father's death. Lucy now has new feelings of guilt, recalling that she actually wished her father dead. Yet, Lucy's guilt is self-proclaimed, and she feels "like Lucifer, doomed to build wrong upon wrong."

Lucy notes that she did not regret not opening her mother's letters until after she had learned of her father's death. With that thought, she sends her mother a last letter telling them she is moving and provides a fake address. When Lucy informs Mariah of her decision to move, Mariah feels betrayed, realizing she is truly alone.

The holidays that year are miserable. Lewis gives Mariah a fur coat that she hates but pretends to like, and Lucy receives an African necklace from Mariah. The new year arrives, and Lucy moves into her new apartment with her best friend Peggy . The apartment is middle class: it has a kitchen, sitting room, two bedrooms, and a bath.

It is a Sunday, and Lucy is glad she does not have to go to church. Sitting at the desk Mariah has given her, Lucy begins to ponder her name: Lucy Josephine Potter . Josephine comes from her mother's uncle, Mr. Joseph. Supposedly, he was rich from the money he made from sugar in Cuba. After his death, however, the family discovered he had lost his fortune and was living in a tomb. Potter is probably from the English slaveholder who owned her family. Lucy recalls that as a young child, she called herself by different names: Emily, Charlotte, and Jane. One day she announced to her mother that she wanted to change her name to Enid. Lucy's mother became very enraged. Not until later did Lucy discover that an obeah named Enid was hired by her father's lover to kill Lucy's mother and her unborn child. Lucy recalls another time when Lucy's mother was pregnant, malnourished and cranky, and Lucy asked why she had been given her name. Lucy's mother responded under her breath that she was named after the devil himself, Lucifer--a character Lucy had read about in Milton's Paradise Lost .

Later that day, Paul brings flowers as a housewarming gift and takes Peggy and Lucy out for dinner. That night Paul sleeps over in Lucy's bed.

On Monday, Lucy starts her job for Timothy Simon , a photographer who takes pictures of still life but really wants to travel the world. Lucy types, answers the phone, and is allowed to develop film in his darkroom when he is not using it. Life in the apartment with Peggy becomes mundane as they grow apart. Lucy feels increasingly alone and isolated. She suspects Paul is cheating with Peggy, but she does not care.

The book closes as Lucy opens a blank book and writes her name on a page in blue ink: Lucy Josephine Potter. The sight of her name on the page causes her to cry she writes: "I wish I could love someone so much I would die from it."

"Lucy" is an highly reflective chapter as Lucy looks back on her year and tries to sort out who she has become and who she is becoming. The physical changes are minor. For example, she now wears her hair closely cut. Yet Lucy knows that a world of change has occurred within, and she tries to process these changes consciously.

Through recollections of past events, Lucy articulates the effects of colonialism on her life. She realizes her ignorance about her homeland when a white tourist describes to her some places on her small island where she has never stepped foot. Lucy resentfully describes what factual knowledge she does have: "I know this: it was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493; Columbus never set foot there but only named it in passing, after a church in Spain" (135). Lucy recalls that even as a young child she resented the notion of imperialism, even though she has never been formally taught or made aware of the modern concept. Lucy remembers refusing to sing, "Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never, never shall be slaves," following her natural, logical observation that she was not British and that she "not too long ago would have been a slave" (135).

Lucy's departure from Mariah's apartment begins with the death of her father. She tries to imagine the details of the funeral: the coffin, his clothes. When Lucy goes to Mariah in order to sort out her mixed emotions, she arrives at the notion of guilt. Lucy sees that guilt has been a central emotion in her life, though she has not always understood it:

Guilty! I had always thought that was a judgment passed on you by others and so it was new to me that it could be a judgment you pass on yourself. Guilty! But I did not feel like a murderer; I felt like Lucifer doomed to build wrong upon wrong.

Guilt is not, however, what Lucy feels when she leaves the apartment. Mariah is angry when Lucy announces her decision. Mariah believes that her support and nurturing has merited loyalty from Lucy, especially now that Lewis has left. But Lucy has no sympathy, at least not for Mariah, and she only wants to say to Mariah, "Your situation is an everyday thing. Men behave this way all the time" (141). Once again, Lucy wants Mariah to confront the reality that Lucy and other women from her country have lived with. The guilt belongs to so many men, not to Mariah or to Lucy.

In this context, some of Lucy's statements involve misandry, perhaps a cultural misandry that either oppresses men or gives them license to act immorally: "Everybody knew that men have no morals, that they do not know how to behave, that they do not know how to treat other people" (142). After moving into her new apartment with Peggy, Lucy expresses this stereotype once again, suspecting that Peggy and Paul are having an affair. But Lucy does not care. She accepts the possibility not only because it is what she expects, but also because Lucy's primary concerns are not for other people, but for herself.

Naming is a powerful concept in this book. As a young girl, Lucy inquired into how she was named. All parts of her name represent important aspects of her identity. Lucy sees the influence of colonialism in her last name, Potter, which she infers is derived from an English slaveholder who owned her relatives prior to their emancipation. A huge part of Lucy's anger is also related to her name through is her mother's low expectations for Lucy. Her mother encouraged her three brothers to go to college while only expecting Lucy to be a nurse. Lucy's middle name, Josephine, indicates this low expectation, because with this name her mother chose to name her after a supposedly rich uncle who died broke and lived in a tomb. Lucy's mother deals another harsh blow to Lucy when she tells her daughter that she is named after the Devil himself, Lucifer.

The reference to Lucifer in Milton's Paradise Lost is apt. In the epic poem, the victory of good over evil is clear, but Milton makes Lucifer very sympathetic for his desire to be free from God's control. Lucy revels in being the anti-hero like Lucifer, rejecting normative morality and convention. While Milton makes clear that God's morals are good and therefore have no need of being challenged, merely human conventions are artifacts of human pride in setting one's own path. Lucy rejects many sets of cultural norms out of the pride that so many readers admire in Lucifer, although she cannot replace those norms with anything but another set of human norms. And it is not clear that she wants any new set of norms as she forges her new identity. Lucy articulates her anthem of radical freedom through self-invention:

I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition. I did not have anything exactly in mind, but when the picture was complete I would know. (134)

Lucy remains stuck in a contradiction, wanting to be free to love with her whole being, which would mean that she is no longer free. At some point, radical freedom must resolve itself into real commitments, but Lucy is not quite ready for this idea. Lucy's false belief that the past is "the person you no longer are, the situations you are no longer in" (137) provides her with a great deal of difficulty as she symbolically and literally starts a new page in her journal. After having rid herself of all attachments, her first desire expresses her difficulty: "I wish I could love someone so much I would die from it" (164).

Lucy Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Lucy is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Why Lucy had a sudden sinking feeling?

Chapter please?

immidiately upon coming to america lucy is faced with disillusionment examine several disillusionment and how they contribute in forming of her evolving identity

Colonialism repeatedly surfaces in Lucy's flashbacks of her homeland, a British colony. As a product of the British educational system, Lucy begins to realize the extent of its influence more powerfully once she has left her home culture. Lucy...

What are comparison drwan between lucy and nature?

In the poem Lucy, Wordsworth doesn't seem able to decide whether Lucy os more like a star in the night sky.... ot a delicate violet. She is, of course, his star.... and yet, he sees more of the violet in her. A delicate bloom aligned with nature.

Study Guide for Lucy

Lucy study guide contains a biography of Jamaica Kincaid, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• Lucy Summary
• Character List

Essays for Lucy

Lucy essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid.

• The Double Lives of Servants: A Comparison and Contrast Between the Representation of Servants in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts and Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy
• Maternal Problematic: The Painful Struggle for Individuality in Three Novels
• I Am Who (You Say) I Am: Issues of Identity in Kincaid's Lucy and Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea
• Mariah in Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy
• Freedom Does Not Equal Happiness: Analyzing Lucy's Choices

Lesson Plan for Lucy

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Lucy
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Lucy Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Lucy

• Introduction
• Plot summary
• Main characters
• Motifs and themes
• The role of Lucy’s past

Review by Brian Eggert July 26, 2014

A film dependent on the myth that we use only 10 percent of our brain, and further driven by the notion of unlocking 100 percent of the brain’s potential, Lucy , by writer-director Luc Besson, taps into the possibilities more than Limitless , another story about the same subject, but succeeds only in delivering an emotionless action-thriller that wants to be smarter than it is. In the 1990s, Besson made some great action yarns with The Professional and The Fifth Element , though in recent years, he’s preferred to grandfather the next generation of action directors like Pierre Morel ( Taken ) and Olivier Megaton ( Colombiana ) by producing and often providing the scripts to profitable shoot-em-ups. With Lucy, he returns to the director’s chair for the kind of story to which he’s most attributed. And rather than blowing audiences away, he’s made a confounding picture that either explores his central idea too much or not enough; either way, it’s an unsatisfying disappointment.

Neither a convincing conflict nor well-developed characters inhabit Besson’s script, about an American tourist of average intelligence who, while in Taiwan, is kidnapped by a crime lord and forced to become a drug mule. Scarlett Johansson’s titular heroine finds herself under the gun of Jang (Choi Min-sik, from the original Oldboy ), an imposing baddie who orders a pouch of an experimental drug called CPH4 sewn into her stomach, and into those of three other unwilling mules. After she’s transported into a shoddy cell, she receives a beating that unseals the pouch and sends the mystery drug coursing through her blood stream, electrifying her synapses in extraordinary shades of blue. As this goes on, Besson cross-cuts to a lecture by Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman), an academic who speculates that things would get pretty out-there—telepathic control over matter, space, and time—should human beings ever gain control over 100 percent of their brain, which is exactly what happens to Lucy. The playful editing by Julien Rey also cross-cuts to nature scenes, such as a cheetah hunting a gazelle, to create a parallel between humans and animals, and demonstrate how far beyond basic primal human instincts Lucy will become.

The best scenes of Lucy occur early on, when there’s still some fragment of humanity left in Johansson’s performance, and her character is using 20 or 30 percent of her brain’s potential (Besson keeps track with a counter that flashes onscreen periodically). Lucy develops the ability to learn and perceive things we cannot imagine, and this transforms her into an unstoppable adversary for Jang’s band of thugs. These scenes where Lucy can out-fight and telekinetically outmaneuver gangsters remind us of Milla Jovovich running circles around alien goons in The Fifth Element . But before long, Lucy’s mental capacities increase and she quickly becomes aware that emotions are elementary functions and only hold us back from exploring our real potential. Here’s where the film begins to slow and we gradually lose any investment. It’s difficult to have sympathy for an already poorly drawn character who, now omnipotent, has no emotions and can do virtually anything she puts her mind to. It may have been more entertaining to preserve the early stage in Lucy’s development and wait until closer to the climax to unlock her full, emotionless potential.

The comparison to The Fifth Element is apt, as both films involve a supreme being who thwarts bad guys. What made The Fifth Element so engaging is that it wasn’t told from the supreme being’s perspective; rather, from that of her lovelorn protector (Bruce Willis). Besson introduces a similar role in Lucy with a Parisian cop Del Rio (Amr Waked), who serves as Lucy’s sidekick and whose scenes feel abridged. At one point, she kisses him as “a reminder” of her humanity; however, the moment feels like a forced attempt to emotionally invest the audience. At any rate, when Lucy begins reading minds and putting whole rooms of baddies to sleep with the wave of her hand, the cop becomes superfluous, and any attempt by Jang’s crew to stop her is devoid of tension when all it takes is a mere thought to defeat them. Meanwhile, Johansson’s character has more in common with her voiced OS in Her , who achieves transcendence through vast knowledge, while her emotionless performance echoes early scenes in Under the Skin , except without the inevitable dramatic payoff.

In the end, Besson’s script is involved in shoddy science propelled by the myth that we only use 10 percent of our brain. (Using EEGs, magnetoencephalographs, MRIs, and PET scans, neuroscientists have found no such dormant areas waiting to be uncovered. But who’s checking?) The myth was first proposed in a 1936 self-help book and has no basis in scientific fact, but still, the myth persists because, well, that’s what myths do. Nevertheless, Besson isn’t concerned with science and would rather enter the furthest reaches of exploratory metaphysics through imagery likened to The Matrix and The Tree of Life , where Lucy sees the world as endless streams of neurons and instantly taps into the vast reaches of space and time. It’s a fun idea, but Lucy never quite pays off in Besson’s usual popcorn-munching no-brainer terms, nor does he succeed in elevating the material to its highbrow possibilities. Indeed, Besson packs a lot of ideas into the brief 89-minute runtime, but he should’ve spent another 20 minutes on character development. And, to get as arbitrarily mathematical as his film, he’s only making use of about 65 percent of his concept’s potential.

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Lucy review – Luc Besson's cerebral sci-fi is set to overload

Peter Parker had his radioactive spider and the Fantastic Four their gamma rays. For Lucy (Scarlett Johansson), the imperilled heroine of Luc Besson's sleek, punchy action caper, superpower comes courtesy of a packet of prototype narcotics that ruptures in her intestine, allowing her to access an extra 90% of her cerebral capacity. Before long, Lucy is an unblinking angel of vengeance, alive to each revolution of the planet and driving hell for leather down the boulevards of Paris. She's like a blend of Marilyn Monroe and the Terminator, as scripted by Ayn Rand.

All of which proves rollickingly entertaining – up to a point. Besson delivers the thrills with aplomb, while Johansson looks to be relishing a role that stands as a kind of populist cousin to her recent, electrifying performance in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin . The problem is that the greater Lucy grows, and the more brain power she colonises, the more the plot risks bursting its bounds and blowing out its levels. What breed of monster has Besson created here? Snickering drug dealers are no match for Lucy. The movie itself can barely contain her. Lucy is hopping across millennia; she has her sights set on the cosmos. At the rate she's going, she should reach the outer edge of the galaxy in about 90 minutes flat.

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Lucy, film review: Scarlett Johansson will blow your mind in Luc Besson's complex thriller

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A decade ago, Luc Besson seemed burned out as a film-maker. There was talk of his retirement. The director of Nikita and Léon was reduced to making animated features (the wretched Arthur and the Invisibles) and to overseeing the growth of his company EuropaCorp, a French version of a Hollywood studio that combines sales and distribution with production.

It would be overstating it to suggest that Besson is enjoying a major creative renaissance but Lucy is the best film he has made in a very long time. This is a movie that perfectly illustrates what makes him such a distinctive and infuriating director. Besson combines bravura imagery and ingenious ideas with large dollops of Gallic kitsch and silliness. His attempts at profundity are continually undermined by an infantile desire to throw in slapstick and action sequences for their own sake. What can't be denied is the brilliance of the execution. Lucy, partly shot in Imax, deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible.

Helped by the cinematographer Thierry Arbogast and by the virtuosity of the special effects technicians at Industrial Light and Magic, the veteran French director has delivered a film that really does induce the same sense of wonder that was found in the silent era in Georges Méliès' fantastical shorts.

The key concept here – promoted relentlessly in the marketing that always accompanies Besson films – is that average humans only use 10 per cent of their brain capacity. In order to demonstrate how somebody would function using the full might of their noggin, Besson devises an incredibly convoluted and complex thriller plot. Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is an American student living a riotous life in Taipei. Her ex-boyfriend persuades her to deliver a mysterious package to a businessman in an upmarket hotel. This package contains a synthetic drug called CPH4 that has mind-bending and enlarging properties. The businessman, really a gangster, forces Lucy and some other unfortunate Europeans to act as drug mules. She has a pouch of the stuff inserted in her guts. When this pouch bursts, she suddenly develops superhuman mental powers.

Having played an alien in Under the Skin and voiced a computer operating system in Her, Johansson is developing a reputation as an utterly fearless actress. She is ready to take roles that more timid Hollywood stars would recoil from instinctively. Lucy allows her to combine two sides of her screen persona: the oddball visionary and the action heroine familiar from Avengers Assemble. Johansson always keeps her poise. She also has an ironic detachment, as if she is at a slight remove from her character. Whether she is instructing a doctor how to remove drugs from her abdomen or using her telepathic powers to make her gun-toting gangster adversaries stick to the ceiling, she is strictly matter of fact in her manner. She helps anchor a film that might otherwise have seemed preposterous.

There are scenes in Lucy which are strangely moving, in which Besson briefly moves away from his kinetic, comic book-style storytelling. We hear the heroine reminiscing about moments in her earliest childhood that she could not possibly remember without the CPH4. As her powers increase, so does the inevitability of her demise – or, at least, that of her body. She can perceive things that she would rather ignore, ranging from her mortality to the potential health problems that her flatmate faces unless she changes her lifestyle.

Between the action scenes, there are also time-outs for philosophising about the nature of time, matter and perception. Lucy's sounding board is Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman), an academic whose area of research is precisely the untapped possibilities of the human mind. Freeman plays the role in just the way you would expect – with a solemn and dignified gravitas.

Lucy: Film stills

Besson borrows ideas and motifs from countless other films, including some of his own. The scene in which Lucy pinions a gangster boss to his chair by sticking blades through his hands owes an obvious debt to the extreme Asian thrillers made by Takashi Miike or Park Chan-wook. The more lyrical, metaphysical moments can't help but invoke memories of Terrence Malick movies such as The Tree of Life. Then, there are the outrageously silly sequences – most notably, a car chase through Paris in which Lucy drives like a maniac – that are in the spirit of Besson's own earlier films.

There is a sense that the screenplay is a puzzle that Besson himself has only partly worked out. He hasn't managed to introduce any meaningful romantic sub-plot. It is clear that the hard-bitten Paris cop chief (played by Egyptian actor Amr Waked) is besotted with Lucy. However, she is so far ahead of him intellectually, and he is so busy keeping Korean gangsters at bay, that there is no time for them to make anything other than the most cursory small talk.

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Lucy may not make sense but it is refreshing to see Besson working at full throttle. The film has an energy and visual inventiveness that was almost entirely lacking in his last feature as a director, The Family, a lazy comedy-thriller in which an ageing mob boss (played by Robert De Niro) hides out in provincial France.

A French director tilting at an international audience, Besson himself often appears to be caught between different cultures and film-making styles. That confusion is reflected in Lucy but is part of the film's richness. From his thriller Nikita (1990) early in his career to The Lady (2011), his biopic of Burmese political leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Besson has often made films about strong and defiant female characters. Lucy may be confused and eccentric but it is stylish, provocative film-making. As an action movie with ideas, it is also a welcome antidote to the mindless, testosterone-driven fare – such as The Expendables – that has been clogging up screens this summer.

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• REVIEW: I Love <i>Lucy</i> — and Luc, and Scarlett

REVIEW: I Love Lucy — and Luc, and Scarlett

Correction appended, July 29, 2014

It’s a fallacy, long rebuffed by science, that humans use only about 10% of their brainpower . But it is true about most summer movies. Pouring their wizardry into special effects and well-choreographed fights, warm-weather action films rarely challenge the viewer with grand notions or beautifully baffling imagery. Viewers who invest two hours in a superhero movie often leave feeling entertained but somehow dumber.

Luc Besson’s Lucy is here to the rescue. The French writer-director-producer’s new movie, about a woman empowered and imperiled by the explosion of a powerful new drug in her nervous system, kicks ass and takes brains. Besson creates a heroine whose rapidly expanding abilities make her the world’s most awesome weapon. In the process, he promotes Scarlett Johansson from an indie-film icon and Marvel-universe sidekick to the movie superwoman she was destined to be. Taking place in less than a day — and synopsizing 3 million years of human evolution in a hurtling 82 min. of screen time — Lucy tops its only competition, Tom Cruise and Doug Liman’s underappreciated Edge of Tomorrow , as the summer’s coolest, juiciest, smartest action movie.

(READ: Corliss’s review of Edge of Tomorrow )

The cleverness in Besson’s film isn’t in its pseudoscience premise — that Johansson’s Lucy is transformed from a clueless American grad student to a genius and martial arts adept as her brain-use percentage skyrockets from 10% to 100%. No, it’s in showing that from great power can come both genetic transformation and personal tragedy. While Marvel heroes live on in countless remakes and reboots, Lucy may not survive the toxic drug that makes her unique. But it does give her a glimpse of the big cosmic picture. “Life was given to us a billion years ago,” she says in a voice-over at the film’s beginning. “What have we done with it?” By the end, she’ll show you.

Rated R for its dollops of violence, this female-glorifying picture not only shames all PG-13-rated summer spectacles for their wimpitude but also lures the audience into accompanying it on a third-act trip of ambitious movie madness. It begins with a vision of the first known hominid, the 3 million-year-old female discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 and nicknamed Lucy, then bombards you with allusive montages (say, of various species copulating) and the intricate drizzle of computer algorithms, and ultimately spirals into transcendent, Kubrickian speculation, all while satisfying the basic movie appetite for twists and thrills.

(FIND: 2001: A Space Odyssey on the updated all-TIME 100 Movies list )

In Taipei, Lucy’s scuzzy friend Richard (Pilou Asbaek) saddles her with a locked briefcase to be delivered to the mysterious Mr. Jang (Choi Min-sik, the Korean star of Oldboy and I Saw the Devil ). In a hotel lobby, Richard is shot dead, while five Asian heavyweights strong-arm Lucy up to Jang’s corpse-littered suite. Rinsing the blood from a few recent murders off his hands, Jang orders her to open the briefcase. It contains four packets of a blue powder, called CPH4; it is, as Jang’s English-speaking aide (Julian Rhind-Tutt) notes, “a drug the kids in Europe are gonna enjoy.”

Lucy is sedated and wakes up with an abdomen scar; her belly has been sliced open to contain one of the four packets. She and three other unfortunates will be muling the drug to European capitals, spurring addiction, death and chaos … unless — there’s always an unless — Lucy can harness her gigabyte brain waves in the few hours she is told she has left to live.

(READ: Did Oldboy inspire the Virginia Tech shootings? )

A sadistic prison guard’s kick to Lucy’s stomach triggers the effects of the CPH4. With her brain power now at 20% (the rising numbers are flashed onscreen like intermittent basketball scores), she overpowers the guard, kills him and takes his gun, walks into the prison kitchen, kills the four guys there, steals one of their jackets to cover the blood stain on her shirt, goes outside, shoots a cabbie who doesn’t quickly enough hop to her request for a ride, takes another cab to the hospital, where she strides into an operating room and, to persuade the doctors of their need for speed in her case, shoots the patient on the surgical table. (A quick scan of the patient’s X-rays tells her he wasn’t going to live anyway.) All this, which would be a long set piece in any other movie, takes about 4 min. Besson is in as much of a hurry as Lucy is.

In a Paris lecture hall, Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman) is spouting the 10% theory: that full use of our mental capacity can allow the earth’s creatures “to go from evolution to revolution.” (He must have just seen Dawn of the Planet of the Apes .) Norman also teaches that humans seek to continue the species either by reproduction or immortality. Lucy had the second option thrust upon her. Before flying to Paris for urgent consultation with Norman, she visits Jang, pinioning his hands to his chair arms with two knife blades and calmly explaining, “Learning is always a painful process.” It is for her: on the plane from Taipei, her cells start breaking up, flying around her. The perfect machine she’s become may be disintegrating.

(READ: The genius chimps in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes )

She spends the rest of the movie in Paris, battling a couple dozen of Jang’s thugs and trying to cope with or accept her potent, poignant new condition. At first delighted by her burgeoning skills and acuity, she soon realizes, by Googling the available literature at supercomputer swiftness, that she can’t control her new power — that “all things human are fading away.” She could be Dr. Jekyll turned into a destructive, nearly indestructible Mr. Hyde; or the scientist, played by Jeff Goldblum in David Cronenberg’s 1986 The Fly , who tries to understand his unique metamorphosis even as he succumbs to it. Similarly, superwoman Lucy wants to hold on to her humanity. In Paris, she abruptly kisses the detective (Amr Waked) assigned to her. “Why’d you do that?” he asks, and she replies, “A reminder” — of what human emotion feels like.

(FIND: The Fly on the all-TIME Top 25 Horror Movies list )

Once in a while, Lucy indulges in the inane conventions of summer action films. How is it that, in Taipei, Lucy can read Jang’s mind (to discover the identities and itineraries of the drug mules sent to Berlin, Rome and Paris), yet on a Paris street she doesn’t notice that her nemesis is 10 feet away? Because it’s a movie! And why, when she’s in a rush to meet the professor, does she insist on driving the wrong way on a one-way highway? Because it’s a Luc Besson movie; most of the films he’s produced, including the Taxi , Transporter and Taken franchises, are full of car chases and crashes.

Another of the Frenchman’s fancies: making action pictures about women. In La Femme Nikita , Anne Parillaud is trained as an assassin. In The Professional , 12-year-old Natalie Portman helped hit man Jean Reno fulfill a contract. The Fifth Element , the filmmaker’s biggest Stateside hit, paired taxi driver Bruce Willis with the galaxy’s most ideal specimen, or speciwoman, Milla Jovovich. He also directed biopics of history’s favorite insurgent heroines, Joan of Arc ( The Messenger ) and Aung San Suu Kyi ( The Lady ). Besson must figure that a gender comprising more than half the world’s human population deserves to be represented playing at least 10% of the lead characters in action films. It’d be fine with me if Hollywood followed Besson’s lead and upped the ratio to Lucy level.

(READ: Michelle Yeoh plays Aung San Suu Kyi in Luc Besson’s The Lady )

In a role originally proposed to Angelina Jolie, Johansson grows from grad-student tearfulness to appropriate a good deal of Jolie’s glowering majesty, and to show all appropriate stages along the way. In the recent British film Under the Skin , Johansson played an alien creature that soullessly seduces human males and harvests their meat. And in Spike Jonze’s her she was the more-human-than-human voice of Joaquin Phoenix’s operating system. Besson’s film restores Johansson’s humanity even as it may slip away from Lucy. The longest single shot is of a phone call Lucy makes from Taipei to her kindly, concerned mother (Laura D’Arista) back in the States. Tears flow from the actress’s right eye, as if Lucy is being drained of all the emotion she has felt and will ever feel, and is weeping for the loss.

(READ: Corliss on Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin )

But don’t weep for Lucy. Just keep track of her strange attributes: the sprouting of extra hands and gooey tentacles. Wonder at her lightning travels across space (she stands in Times Square as humanity zooms around her at a Koyaanisqatsi tempo) and time (when the oldest Lucy and the newest touch fingers in a Sistine Chapel–ceiling moment). And be appreciative that, toward the end of a summer with a lot of meh action epics, one film has shown how the genre can accommodate a crazy-great movie. Thank you, Scarlett, Luc and Lucy .

Correction: The original version of this story misstated the name of Morgan Freeman’s character. It is Samuel Norman. The story also misspelled Milla Jovovich’s name.

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Angela Watercutter

*Lucy'*s Based on Bad Science, and 6 More Secrets About the Film

Luc Besson's Lucy is based on a lie.

The general premise is that a young woman named Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) gets abducted by a gang in Taipei and forced to carry a bag of drugs in her abdomen. But when the bag bursts, the drug gives her access to the 90 percent of her brain that most of us never use, making her superhuman. The idea that we only use 10 percent of our brains, however, is a myth —a fact more than a few recent stories recently have taken pride in pointing out. The writer/director, in turn, would like to remind them it's fiction.

"It's not true," Besson says. "The good thing with movies is that you mix up everything and then in the end it looks real."

There are a few more true tidbits in the film for science buffs, though. Like, for example, the fact that Lucy is named after the skeleton of the Australopithecus afarensis found in 1974 that is our most famous early human ancestor . WIRED got on the phone with Besson to ask him about neuroscience and some of Lucy 's other secrets.

Although it gets bandied around a bit, the idea that we only use 10 percent of our brains is a scientific myth . Still, the brain does have billions of neurons processing a lot of data that we're basically in the dark about. "The numbers of communication per second is absolutely phenomenal," Besson says. "And we have no access to this information. So it was very easy to me to say, 'What happens if one day we have access to our information—if our brain suddenly makes that connection, and then we can have access to it? We could change our blood pressure; we could change everything."

The opening of Lucy shows scenes of cell division and prehistoric wildlife intercut with the eponymous heroine being forced into ferrying drugs. Initially, it seems a little out of place, but more than an hour later Besson ties it all things together. "I wanted to de-structure the storytelling, because I wanted the people to be ready at the end to believe something unbelievable," Besson says. "If I was too straightforward, without cheetahs, without cells, without anything, it would be like a thriller and then the end would be weird. So I needed to prep the audience from the beginning, like 'You have to be ready for everything.'"

Going back to his earlier films like 1990's La Femme Nikita to Léon: The Professional (1994), Besson is known for writing badass female characters. Lucy is no different. From the beginning she's not particularly tough or intelligent, but when she's pushed (and drug-enhanced) she uses her brains (and a little brawn) to get back at the gang that abducted her and forced her into smuggling drugs. "I'm not male-oriented, like in the ’80s where you have the big muscle guy and the girl is crying in the back," Besson says. "You know the story of Achilles? For me Achilles without the tendon is of no interest. His weakness makes him interesting. That's what I like about women. It's difficult for a woman to compete with a man because he's usually stronger, so women have to be more clever, more intelligent, more sneaky, more everything. They have to find another way and that is so attractive."

His star was "not joking around" when it came to playing the heroine in Lucy , even though Besson jokes that "she had 500 questions" about the film and the role. That was a good thing; once Lucy reaches a certain level of brain functionality, she loses all her empathy and personality. "There is nothing of Lucy that Scarlett can use," Besson says. "We had to reinvent how to move, how to talk, expressions. [Scarlett] was very concerned and very pragmatic, very much about the work. For this type of film you don't need a star, you need an actress."

Besson first got the idea for Lucy nearly a decade ago, after meeting a woman who he thought was trying to be an actress but was actually a neuroscientist. They spoke for hours and "I was fascinated by this subject." Besson spent the next nine years talking with neuroscientists to learn more and writing the script. "I'm like a sponge, I need to know a lot before I can start to make a feature film" he says. "My first idea was to say, 'OK, I want to do a thriller, I want to do something entertaining, but I want some food in it.' You can't talk about the brain and just be goofy. … But when the script was ready, I really, really loved it. I wanted to do it, there was no way I would give this script to anybody else."

It wouldn't be a Besson movie if there wasn't at least one balls-to-the-wall action sequence. Lucy 's takes place in broad daylight, as Lucy leads a wild car chase through the streets of Paris. So how did he send Lucy and friends from the Arc de Triomphe to Place de la Concorde—two of the busiest places in the city—without plowing through huge crowds? He waited until the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, a time in France when everyone leaves the cities—like Fourth of July in the States. "Paris is totally empty for three days, except for some Japanese tourists and Chinese tourists, who wake up at 11 a.m. because they're jetlagged anyway," Besson says. "Usually with car chases you can feel that it's some very specific area or very specific hours of the day or night, and I wanted to a car chase in the very worst place in Paris at noon. That was fun to do."

Most thrillers have a quest for power, Besson explains, and there's usually a bad guy who wants it and a good guy who wants to prevent them. In Lucy , an average woman gets the greatest power imaginable and has no choice but to try and pass on her knowledge (which is virtually infinite by the end). "The first line she has when she knows that she's going to get all the power, she says, 'I don't know what to do with it,'" he says. "Usually they know what they want to do with it. They want to destroy, they want to steal, they want to conquer. But at this level of power, the only thing she can do is pass it on. I think it's such a lesson, because that's exactly what the cell—which is the first image of the film—that's what the cell is doing, just passing on everything she knows to the other one."

Adrienne So

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Reece Rogers

• Neuroscience

Scarlett Johansson Film Lucy Pushes 10 Percent Brain Myth

Lucy film plot revolves on the myth that we only use 10 percent of our brains..

Posted August 18, 2014

The plot for the science fiction action thriller Lucy revolves on the myth we only use 10 percent of our brains. Myth. Directed by Luc Besson and starring actress Scarlett Johansson as the eponymous heroine with co-star Morgan Freeman playing the scientist trying to help her, the film depicts a young woman who involuntarily ingests an experimental drug that increases her ability to tap her brain's other 90 percent. Her basic skills are enhanced, her perception is sharpened, her abilities to analyze and learn speed up, and she gains paranormal abilities that include telekinesis , telepathy, and a form of mental time travel. As she reaches 90 percent brain usage, other characters wonder what will happen when she hits 100 percent.

Why do so many people think our brain usage is 10 percent? We do not know for certain where this arbitrary percentage originated, although we do know it has no basis in science. As early as the 1890s, William James asserted - reasonably enough and without specifying any amount - that we only utilize a fraction of our intellectual potential . By the time an ad in the 1929 World Almanac claimed, "Scientists and psychologists tell us we use about TEN PERCENT of our brain power" (cited in Beyerstein, 1999, p. 11), the number had crept in. Different sources will make different claims about where that number comes from, but they are guessing. We really do not know.

In point of fact, the brain uses more energy than any other organ in the human body , so it stays busy. "We use virtually every part of the brain, and [most of] the brain is active almost all the time," says Johns Hopkins School of Medicine neurologist Barry Gordon. "The brain represents three percent of the body's weight and uses 20 percent of the body's energy ."

"It's impossible to work out how much of our brain we are using quantitatively. However, it is definitely much more than 10 percent," says Barbara Sahakian said, University of Cambridge professor of clinical neuropsychology . Others, like Dr. Eric Chudler , assert flatly that we already use our brains in their entirety . How well we make use of them, well, that's another story.

In the Discovery Channel series MythBusters , their build team ( Grant Imahara , Kari Byron , and Tory Belleci ) took a crack at this one in episode 151, "Tablecloth Class," and deemed it busted . Beyerstein (1999) and many other professionals make key points when refuting the myth, including but not limited to these:

• Almost no brain area can be damaged without impairing performance of some kind.
• Brain scans show the brain is always active.
• Barring brain damage, no specific neurons consistently stay dark across different people's brain scans.
• Brain functions are less localized than previously assumed.
• Unused brain cells tend to degenerate, which would cause much greater brain loss than is typically seen in the course of early life.
• Natural selection would have provided an advantage to people with smaller, more efficient brains.
• Conditions like Parkinson's produce devastating effects while damaging much smaller percentages of the brain.
• We never hear a doctor say, "Luckily, the bullet through your brain only hit parts you weren't using. "

Lucy is not the first film to perpetuate this nonsense, not by any means, nor will she be the last.

Essential Reading

Beyerstein, B. L. (1999). Whence cometh the myth that we only use 10% of our brains? In S. Della Sala (Ed.), Mind-Myths: Exploring Popular Assumptions about the Mind and Brain (pp. 3-24). Chichester: John Wiley and Sons.

You can follow me on Twitter as @Superherologist or find me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/BatmanBelfry . I'd love to hear from you!

Travis Langley, Ph.D. , a professor at Henderson State University, is the author of Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight.

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July 25, 2014

Lucy Film Hinges on Brain Capacity Myth

On July 25, French film writer/director Luc Besson's action thriller Lucy opens in theaters nationwide. The premise is that the title character, played by Scarlett Johansson, is exposed to a drug that unlocks her mind, giving her superhuman powers of cognition.

By Kate Wong

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

On July 25, French film writer/director Luc Besson’s action thriller Lucy opens in theaters nationwide. The premise is that the title character, played by Scarlett Johansson, is exposed to a drug that unlocks her mind, giving her superhuman powers of cognition. The movie production notes [PDF] elaborate:

“…It has long been hypothesized that human beings only use a small percentage of our cerebral capacity at any given time. For centuries, speculative science has postulated what would occur if mankind could actually evolve past that limit. Indeed, what would happen to our consciousness and newfound abilities if every region of the brain was concurrently active? If each one of the 86 billion densely packed neurons in a human brain fired at once, could that person become, in fact, superhuman?”

The notion that we humans have massive reserves of gray matter just sitting there waiting to be summoned into service has obvious appeal, but there is no scientific evidence to support it. And what’s odd about Besson’s reliance on this myth is that, according to the production notes, he allegedly set out to make the storyline scientifically plausible:

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“Although Besson believed that the idea of expanding one’s brain capacity made for tremendous action-thriller material, he was particularly intent on grounding—at least in part— Lucy in scientific fact.”

Apparently he missed or ignored the many scientists who would have surely informed him that the idea that we use only a small portion of our brain (10 percent, the story usually goes) is wrong. As Barry L. Beyerstein of the Brain Behavior Laboratory at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver explained in a piece for Scientific American :

“…the brain, like all our other organs, has been shaped by natural selection. Brain tissue is metabolically expensive both to grow and to run, and it strains credulity to think that evolution would have permitted squandering of resources on a scale necessary to build and maintain such a massively underutilized organ. Moreover, doubts are fueled by ample evidence from clinical neurology. Losing far less than 90 percent of the brain to accident or disease has catastrophic consequences. What is more, observing the effects of head injury reveals that there does not seem to be any area of the brain that can be destroyed by strokes, head trauma, or other manner, without leaving the patient with some kind of functional deficit. Likewise, electrical stimulation of points in the brain during neurosurgery has failed so far to uncover any dormant areas where no percept, emotion or movement is elicited by applying these tiny currents….”

Neither do we regularly use only a little bit of the brain at a time, as science writer Robynne Boyd reported in a piece for Scientific American. She quoted neurologist Barry Gordon of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine:

""It turns out though, that we use virtually every part of the brain, and that [most of] the brain is active almost all the time," Gordon adds. "Let's put it this way: the brain represents three percent of the body's weight and uses 20 percent of the body's energy."

Yet just because we are already using our entire brain does not mean we can’t enhance its powers. Exercise and diet can boost cognitive performance . And some researchers think cognitive training can make people smarter .

As for cognitive-enhancing drugs, the few that are available, such as Ritalin and Provigil, are quite the opposite of the compound Lucy is exposed to in the film. Rather than stimulating all of the brain’s neurons to sense everything in one’s environment, these drugs work to help people zero in. The results are a mixed bag, however, as my colleague Gary Stix has observed :

“Most of today’s cognitive enhancers improve our ability to focus—but most benefits accrue to those with attention deficits. They allow the child with ADHD to learn the multiplication tables, but for those with average attention spans or better, these drugs can sometimes usher in comic mishaps.

Instead of cramming for the [Chinese Proficiency Test], as you might have intended, you are liable to get sidetracked into the most mundane of trivialities: you might get up from your textbooks for a drink of water and spend the next two days replacing the leaky plumbing in your kitchen sink. The focus of attention ‘sticks’ to whatever is in front of your face and a friend with a verbal crowbar has to pry you away.”

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• Oct 3, 2014
• Was the drug gang Korean, Chinese, Japanese, or what?
• What happened to the source of drug (who gave it to Richard in the first place) and why didn't Lucy track that?
• Why isn't the briefcase handcuffed to Richard at the beginning?
• July 25, 2014 (United States)
• United Kingdom
• Official Facebook
• Official Tumblr (United States)
• Taipei City, Taiwan
• TF1 Films Production
• Grive Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $40,000,000 (estimated)
• $126,663,600
• $43,899,340
• Jul 27, 2014
• $469,058,574

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 29 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• Dolby Atmos

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Lucy (2014) : Movie Plot Ending Explained

This film is about the concept of how humans don’t utilize more than 10% of their brains. No we’re not talking about those idiots who drive while talking on their phone or chatter through entire films. Even the more intelligent, evolved humans are unable to tap into more than 10% – 15% of their brain power. Many scientists have shunned this theory. There are a group of people who are aligned to this theory in the real world today. Morgan Freeman, the voice of God, plays a scientist in this movie (Prof Norman) who advocates the theory of 10%. Here’s the plot and ending of Lucy explained; spoilers ahead.

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Oh, and if this article doesn’t answer all of your questions, drop me a comment or an FB chat message, and I’ll get you the answer .  You can find other film explanations using the search option on top of the site.

Lucy Plot Explained

Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, a student living in Taipei. Her boyfriend tricks her into working for his Korean mob boss. Her job is to transport a new type of drug CPH4 which has been placed into her stomach through surgery. This is a make-belief drug which is planned to be sold in Europe. Lucy gets attacked by one of the mob men and this causes the packet in her stomach to rip.

I’m going to keep away from stepping into the details of each of the scenes and focus on what’s happening with Lucy. The drug affects Lucy in a way that enables her to tap into more than 10% of her brain capacity. We’re given a clear visual through the film as to where her percentage utilization has reached.

Why would increased brain usage result in better combat skills?

The first set of consequences of the drug results in Lucy becoming physically more enhanced. Well, perhaps this can be attributed to adrenaline. Adrenaline is a hormone secreted in our bodies by glands. The hormone increases the fight or flight response. When in state of panic, the hormone is secreted and causes a higher state of alertness and reduces reaction time. Of course, this is short lived for normal people. For Lucy this would be in much higher proportions and results in much higher state of physical speed and reflexes. She’s also losing her ability to feel pain and other emotions in general. That helps in a fight.

How does increased brain activity lead to telepathy?

She kills her captors and telepathically gains information of the other drug mules with CPH4 inside them. Let’s look a little into telepathy. It is the fictional ability a person has to read another person’s mind. The brain works based on a series of electric signals being passed around in the neural network. If the sense of touch can be increased many folds, it could theoretically feel the electric activity in another person’s brain. I know it’s far fetched, stay with me here. With an enhanced brain, Lucy can now decode another person’s brain functions. She taps into his memory to gain access to the destinations of all the mules. That’s all I’ve got. Please do comment if you have a better theory.

Lucy uses her home computer and reaches out to Prof. Norman. She hacks into Prof. Norman’s hotel room TV. We can assume that it is a smart TV which has Internet access, therefore an IP and a vulnerable port that can be hacked. Lucy has a higher understanding of the human body now and figures that her roommate can possibly suffer from a critical ailment and warns her to change her lifestyle.

What happens to Lucy on the flight? What is she doing with two laptops?

Lucy begins tracking down each of the mules. She locates officer Pierre to aid her with the situation. Lucy is collating all her learnings into document format and is using two laptops to increase her typing speed. Why can’t she simply alter the electric pulses in the computer to create documents? Perhaps she can’t do that just yet. What she can do is sense the air hostess’ medical condition to preempt the nose bleed. She doesn’t need touch to do this anymore. Just like we can sense when something is hot based on the ambience and don’t have to actually burn our hand to figure it’s hot.

Lucy sips on champagne and apparently that does not go well with CPH4. Note to self – do not mix alcohol and CPH4. This causes Lucy’s cell structure to want to disintegrate. What we see happening to her is parts of her just disintegrating. Does the champagne do this, may be, or her body is reaching a stage where each cell has the ability to self sustain and doesn’t need to be connected to the rest of the cells. Lucy controls her body by eating more CPH4. Withdrawal symptoms in short, maybe.

How does increased brain activity lead to telekinesis?

Lucy pairs with Pierre while he watches her take out a set of goons with her mind. She throws in an invisible forcefield and sets the gang afloat. What we see here is telekinesis. Telekinesis is a fictional ability to move objects using just the brain. Well, all matter is made up of atoms. If one has the heightened ability to interact with the matter in air to form a chain reaction to finally affect the destination matter (in this case the goons), you can have people up and floating in no time. The forcefield works the same way. Get the molecules of air to contract and work like a solid object, you can make an invisible wall.

Lucy collects all the CPH4 and heads with Pierre to meet Prof Norman. Norman explains the purpose of life is to pass on knowledge, this happens at the level of DNA. Lucy asks for the remainder of CPH4 to be pumped into her. This is where the shit gets crazy.

Lucy Ending Explained: What on earth is happening to Lucy in the end?

Once all the CPH4 goes in, her brain nears 90% utilization. As Lucy’s brain function elevates further and further, she is able to tap into and use all forms of energy around her. She can look into the past or the stars and galaxy because they are all forms of light energy that she can access. (eg: The reflection of yourself in a mirror is you looking at the past – because light takes finite time to travel from you to the mirror and back to your eyes)

Apparently, at this point her brain can restructure all of the cells of the body to transform into some weird computer of sorts. After all, the computer has been designed based on the human brain. Lucy is hard at work collating all her understanding into a readable medium. A medium that can be plugged into a USB port. Well, given that’s the only interface that we use, her device adheres to our current capability.

The final disintegration bit was a little outrageous. The theory there is that with 100% tapping of a brain’s functions, you don’t need to exist in the physical form of a human at all. She becomes an omnipresent consciousness that is connected through pure energy. Pure energy that can alter other form of energy as she likes. She is able to control electromagnetic fields to get networks to send out SMSs. SMSs are after all signals that are sent to the phone over a wireless network.

I’m not sure if research was done into the Indian philosophies around dvaitam , advaitam and vishishtadvaitam for this film. The resemblance is uncanny.

Dvaitam : Is the concept that most of the world follows. There is a divine power and there are the creations of the divine power. This is dualism. God and Man.

Advaitam : Is the concept of one single reality. Atman (the living soul) is the same as Bhraman (single reality). What life is, is merely an illusion that we perceive. Everything living is merely a combined conscience. To get to that realization is deemed attaining Nirvana. God, Man is all one, just need to perceive it.

Vishishtadvaitam : is the concept of one single reality too. The difference is that here we have the divine power has multiplicity. This means the living exist in a pseudo-singular existence, but death causes the being to unite with the single reality. God, Man is all one and united post life.

Lucy explains that “we never really die”. This pairs well with the concept of Vishishtadvaitam where death only leads to rejoining a singular reality. Lucy, based on the concepts of Advaitam, has attained Nirvana and is now aware that she’s part of that singular reality and doesn’t need her physical body anymore. “She is everywhere”. Some of the concepts posed by the film borderline with insanity, but hope helps clear some cloud.

Barry is a technologist who helps start-ups build successful products. His love for movies and production has led him to write his well-received film explanation and analysis articles to help everyone appreciate the films better. He’s regularly available for a chat conversation on his website and consults on storyboarding from time to time. Click to browse all his film articles

Lucy : The Dumbest Movie Ever Made About Brain Capacity

An extended spoilereview of Luc Besson’s worst film to date

Every now and then a movie comes along that’s so beyond-the-pale sloppy, so disastrous in both conceit and execution, that it simply defies conventional analysis. It happened with The Happening . There was something unspeakably wrong with The Words . And Broken City was utterly beyond repair.

So, too, with Lucy , the writer/director/producer Luc Besson’s mind-bendingly miscalculated sci-fi vehicle for Scarlett Johansson. In its defense, I can offer only that Johansson is a moderately charismatic presence (despite playing a character who barely qualifies as a character) and that the film clocks in at a mercifully brief 89 minutes. That said, the sheer quantity of inanity that Besson squeezes into his limited screen time beggars that of awful movies of substantially greater length.

Consequently, what follows is not a review but a spoilereview. If you are genuinely considering watching Lucy —and I urgently recommend that you reconsider—you should stop reading now. If, by contrast, you plan to give the movie a pass and would like to have your good judgment ratified (or, alternatively, if you have stumbled out of the theater bewildered and seeking commiseration), read on. Because while Besson has made very, very bad films in the past—most recently, last year’s The Family —this is the first time he has made a film so idiotic that the only way to properly convey its flaws is to enumerate them.

1. The movie’s first image is of a single cell, shimmying in the light; then, in huge letters Scarlett Johansson ; then, the cell dividing via mitosis into two identical duplicates, and then four. This is what is referred to in Hollywood as “wishful thinking.”

2. We watch as an early hominid, Australopithecus, drinks water from a stream a few million years ago. In voiceover, Johansson asks us, “Life was given to us a billion years ago. What have we done with it?” Flash forward to a montage of modern metropolises buzzing away, full of cars and buses and skyscrapers and clothed people engaging in spoken language. Was Johansson’s question rhetorical? Because it actually seems as though we’ve accomplished quite a lot since we were naked and furry, drinking water from streams.

3. Ah, but now we’re in Taipei, and we get the point. A moderately unkempt Johansson—her character’s name is Lucy, and she is a student, though the latter fact is entirely irrelevant—is talking to a chump in a beard and foolish sunglasses outside a fancy office building. This is what she meant about our having wasted a billion years of life on Earth: However much we may have evolved otherwise, some of us—even some who look like Scarlett Johansson—still date jerks as self-evident as this one. This regrettable beau (they’ve been together a week) confirms the lesson by telling Lucy, against all available evidence, that he’s recently visited a museum. There, he made the discovery that “The first woman was named Lucy.” Yes, that was the Australopithecus we saw by the stream. Yes, this is the kind of movie we are in for.

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4. Now it’s time for some plot, though I’m being generous with the term: Lucy’s semi-boyfriend is acting as a courier, transporting a small silver briefcase to someone in the office building. But he’s had trouble with building security in the past, so he asks her to take it in for him—he assures her it’s “only paperwork”—and to deliver it to a “Mr. Jang.” When she declines, he handcuffs her to the case, claiming that only Jang has the combination. So Lucy reluctantly goes into the building, asks for Jang, and is whisked upstairs by goons. The boyfriend is immediately executed, which can only be regarded as a relief all around.

5. Intercut with the previous scene is footage of a cheetah stalking, and ultimately downing, an antelope on the Serengeti. (Besson was evidently among the very few fans of Ridley Scott’s The Counselor .) It’s a metaphor, you see, for the bad guys who are closing in on helpless Lucy. In a little while, we’ll be treated a few more nature reels, though these will be used in a more literal fashion. After that, the movie will abandon the gimmick altogether. Rarely does one have the acute, real-time experience of watching a film recognize that one of its principal stylistic flourishes is so lame that it must be summarily discarded.

6. But back to Lucy. Upstairs she meets Jang, who is the kind of businessman who brutally murders people while wearing a $10,000 suit, and then rinses the gore off his hands with Evian. (He’s played by South Korean actor Choi Min-sik, of Oldboy fame.) Jang speaks no English, nor do any of the many flunkies attending him, which seems odd for a big-time Taipei businessman. So he calls an interpreter on the phone in order to communicate with Lucy. He then has her open the case, which contains a crystalline blue powder. His goons wheel in a junkie to test the stuff. After one snort, the junkie starts giggling wildly and they shoot him. Then Jang offers Lucy a “job,” she says no, and one of the goons punches her in the face.

7. It’s around this time that we’re introduced to our secondary star, Morgan Freeman, brought in with the obvious (though wildly unsuccessful) mission of lending scientific and philosophical gravitas to the proceedings. Freeman plays a renowned neuroscientist, “Professor Norman” (no first name necessary), who is delivering a lecture to a packed crowd of well-heeled attendees. He explains that most species use only 3-5 percent of their “cerebral capacity,” that human beings use 10 percent—a complete falsehood , incidentally—and that dolphins use 20 percent. ( So long, and thanks for all the fish !) He goes so far as to suggest that if we used more of our own brainpower, we’d be able to echolocate too, though he’s mum on the question of whether this would require us to wander around clicking all the time.

8. In addition to offering a variety of silly, daily-calendar-level bromides, Professor Norman makes the point that, when endangered, species focus on self-preservation, but when circumstances are safe, they focus on reproduction. This is an excuse for the second (and last) phase of the wildlife footage, in which we have an opportunity to watch a variety of creatures (rhinoceroses, tropical frogs) humping. I have no doubt that there is a fetish community devoted to such fare, but I suspect it requires a more rarefied taste than that of the average summer moviegoer.

9. Back to Lucy. When she awakes from her punch to the face, she’s taken to a fancy high-rise office suite, offered a drink in a cut-crystal glass, and told she’s had a minor surgery to implant a packet of that blue-powder drug, called CPH4, in her abdomen. She and a trio of other mules are to smuggle the drugs back to their home countries, where they’ll be retrieved by Jang’s men.

9a. A side note: When told about her unwanted surgery, Lucy replies “I don’t care about the scar.” Attentive viewers may recall that Johansson made light of a nearly identical injury/blemish in Captain America: The Winter Soldier . Is this a thing now? Is 2014 the year of the Scar-Jo abdominal scar?

10. Lucy is inexplicably taken to a cell that is as dingy as the office suite was opulent. There, a guard sexually harasses her and then kicks her in the stomach exactly where the packet of drugs is stashed . You’d think that a massively well-financed international drug cartel would remember to tell its heavies not to do this. The drug seeps into her system, and onscreen text shows us that she has now hit 20 percent of her cerebral capacity. Alas, she does not start echolocating. Instead, she immediately begins to levitate. (Take that, dolphins!)

11. As the movie progresses, we will regularly be kept abreast of Lucy’s increasing cerebral capacity (30 percent! 60 percent!). It’s a useful tool, enabling viewers to judge just how much more of the movie they will have to endure before she hits 100 and it’s over.

12. A non-comprehensive list of the powers Lucy acquires over the course of the film: perfect marksmanship, extreme agility, and instantaneous reflexes; the ability to control TVs and cell phones from thousands of miles away; immunity to pain and fear; telepathy, telekinesis, and clairvoyance; expertise in driving a car really fast into oncoming traffic; teleportation across time and space; and the capacity to alter her existing body parts or grow new ones. The one power she doesn’t seem to have—oddly, given the initial levitation—is flight. This is presumably because if she did, Besson would have no excuse to have her exercise her aforementioned car-driving skills to create rampant vehicular mayhem in Paris. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

13. So, to recap: A small amount of CPH4 makes you giggle. Somewhat more begins giving you all the powers noted above. Does this not make Mr. Jang the most inept criminal mastermind of all time? Why sell the stuff to junkies, when you could use it to create an army of super-soldiers, or to grant yourself god-like powers? And how can it be that no one else in the film, witnessing Lucy’s remarkable paranormal abilities, thinks, “Hey, maybe I should try a little of that CPH4 myself!” Half the film is spent chasing down the packets stashed in the other mules, yet despite rampant opportunities no one other than Lucy ever actually takes any of this all-powerful super-drug.

14. A couple more choice bits from Professor Norman’s speech, which is still being interspersed with the main plot: He notes with self-satisfaction that the human race needs to advance from “evolution to revolution,” which his upscale audience applauds enthusiastically, suggesting that they can’t tell the difference between a genuine insight and a sneaker ad. He also laments that “We don’t know anything more than a dog that watches the moon.” I fear that on the basis of this film it might be plausibly presumed that we actually know less.

15. But back, again, to Lucy and the central plot. She learns Chinese in a few minutes and busts out of her cell and into a hospital. There, she shoots a patient on the operating table and dumps the body onto the floor to make room for the surgeons to instead operate on her to remove the CPH4 from her abdomen. (This is an okay thing for her to do, because she’s also taught herself enough radiology and oncology to be confident that the other patient was going to die anyway.) The very concerned doctors explain to Lucy that CPH4 is a substance that occurs naturally in women during their sixth week of pregnancy (note: it’s not) that gives fetuses the “energy” to build their skeletal structure. How this fits in with everything else we’ve been told about “cerebral capacity” is left to viewers to puzzle out. Moreover, again, how is it that a bunch of random Chinese ER doctors seem to know more about the power and perils of CPH4 than, say, the pharmaceutical industry, the military-industrial complex, and the actual global crime syndicate that is smuggling the drug around the world?

16. While the doctors are operating on Lucy, she calls her mother back in the States. The first thing mom asks is whether Lucy is partying too much, which suggests (along with other hints along the way) that she may have had lifestyle-related issues in the past. Lucy says no, she’s fine, and then proceeds to go on a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy about all the things she can now, thanks to her enhanced cerebral capacity, remember with perfect accuracy—every kiss mom ever gave her, a cat they had when she was 1 year old, etc. It all culminates with this doozy: “I remember the taste of your milk in my mouth.” (Needless to say, this is a line that I will spend the remainder of the summer trying to un-remember.) The truly crazy part, however, is that after this long, super-creepy monologue, Lucy’s mom doesn’t ask the question that any parent in the world would ask under the circumstances: “Are you on drugs?” Instead, it’s just: Thanks for calling, hon. Great to catch up. Kudos on that whole recovered memory about the taste of my breast milk.

17. Lucy busts back into Jang’s place, stabs him through both hands, and reads his mind to discover the destinations of her three fellow mules, specifically Paris, Berlin, and Rome. My first thought was that Besson assumed that these are the only European cities with which an American audience would be familiar. But no, it’s worse than that: When the mules arrive at their stops, onscreen text announces “Paris—France,” “Berlin—Germany,” and “Rome—Italy.” This is doubtless to assist dimly provincial Americans who might otherwise have thought the mules were all headed for Texas, which has its own Paris , Berlin , and Rhome .

18. Lucy calls a policeman in Paris and tells him to alert law enforcement in the other two cities. She also gets in touch with Professor Norman, who is conveniently visiting Paris himself. She tells him that she’ll be at his door in 12 hours, which is impressive, given that a nonstop flight from Taipei to Paris takes a couple hours more than that and she hasn’t even headed to the airport yet. Is she bending time? Using her mind to make commercial airlines move faster? Put me on a flight with that girl!

19. Okay, Lucy’s not even at 30 percent yet, and this exercise is already beginning to feel as lengthy and punishing as watching the movie itself. So let’s start wrapping things up by noting that from here out, almost nothing of narrative consequence occurs. After a brief interlude in which Lucy starts disintegrating on her flight, she arrives safely in Paris and drives past the Tuileries at ill-advised velocity, causing a large number of presumably fatal car wrecks. She, the crime lord Jang, the other mules, her new policeman friend, and about 500 French cops and Asian gangsters converge on a hospital, where the latter two groups shoot at one another interminably, except for a brief lull when Lucy intervenes and makes everybody float through the air helplessly. She meets Professor Norman and some colleagues of his who, despite their accumulated scientific wisdom, do nothing except gape at how awesome she is and then help her to take all the CPH4 in order to crank it up to 11 and achieve 100 percent cerebral capacity.

20. Along the way, Lucy explains that “sounds are music that I can understand, like fluids.” I just had to get that line in. There are a dozen others nearly as bad/good.

21. She kisses the French policeman as a “reminder” of her humanity.

22. At 70 percent, Lucy starts vomiting pure energy and light.

23. At 80 percent, she grows slithery black tendrils and transports Professor Norman and his colleagues with her into an all-white limbo, kind of like where Harry Potter went when he was dead in that last movie.

24. At 90 percent, she begins journeying through space and time while wearing a black cocktail dress and sitting in a cut-rate ergonomic office chair. (She couldn’t at least conjure herself a nice Aeron ?) She visits Times Square, meets some American Indians, and encounters dinosaurs constructed out of CGI so primitive they look like a first-generation game on a Nintendo DSi.

25. 99 percent …

26. At 100 percent, Lucy vanishes out of her cocktail dress at the exact moment that an inconceivably still-alive Jang shows up to shoot her. What has become of our heroine? One of the random scientists gasps, “Look! The computer—it’s moving.” And indeed the machine, which is now also sporting slithery black tendrils, is forming something new, an object that it wants to offer to Professor Norman. It’s slender and obsidian and dotted with shimmering points of light. Is it some kind of otherworldly totem or talisman? No, it’s a … flash drive.

I promise that I am not making this up.

Johansson closes the movie with a voiceover echoing the one that opened the film: “Life was given to us a billion years ago. Now you know what to do with it.”

That’s right. What we are meant to “do” with this precious gift of life, our highest destiny and the final stage of human development, is to take massive quantities of drugs so that we can all leave our mortal flesh behind and evolve into glittery disco flash drives. Now you know.

Update, March 2015: If you enjoyed this, you may want to take a look at my spoilereview of the Sean Penn vanity action flick The Gunman.

Screen Rant

Scarlett johansson’s $469m action movie sequel gets honest update from director 10 years later.

Writer/director Luc Besson gives an honest update on a sequel to Scarlett Johansson's action movie Lucy 10 years after it was a $469 million success.

• Luc Besson expresses surprise and confusion over reports of a potential Lucy 2 .
• The ending of the first movie presents a unique challenge in creating a sequel storyline.
• A spinoff TV show centered on Morgan Freeman's character is already in development, though no updates have been given in two years.

As the filmmaker mounts a return to the director's chair, Luc Besson has a disappointing update on Lucy 2 . The 2014 movie starred Scarlett Johansson as the titular American student in Taiwan who, after inexplicably becoming a drug mule, begins developing superhuman abilities from the drugs she's meant to be transporting. Scoring mixed-to-positive reviews and amassing an impressive $469 million box office haul against its $40 million production budget, talks have swirled in the years since about a potential follow-up.

During a recent interview with The Playlist for his upcoming drama thriller Dogman , Besson was asked about whether Lucy 2 will come to fruition. The writer/director revealed that the reports about the sequel over the years have been " news to him " and indicated that he has not been approached to direct or develop any follow-up to his hit movie. Check out what Besson shared below:

Yeah, I heard that [was happening]. I even read that. Yeah, I was glad to hear [it.] I said, "Oh? Give me the script." You know, that’s the problem sometimes with the internet is I don’t know where [the information] comes from. Sometimes, I see that my name is on a movie that I haven’t been aware of.

How The Lucy Franchise Could Return (Without A Sequel)

In the years since the first movie's release, Besson has frequently shot down reports that he would be developing Lucy 2 . In previous comments, the filmmaker has indicated the biggest hurdle he's faced in coming up with a plan for a sequel is figuring out how to pick up from Lucy 's ending , in which Johansson's character both transformed into a supercomputer and left a mystical flash drive for Morgan Freeman's Professor Norman, while also disappearing into an unknown place in time.

Despite this seemingly conclusive ending, there are still routes a Lucy follow-up could take. The primary option is one that's already said to be in the works, as it was announced in late 2022 that a spinoff TV show was in development at EuropaCorp and Village Roadshow centered on Freeman's character. Though plot details remain under wraps for the time being, it seems likely the show will take place after the events of the movie, following Professor Norman as he further investigates what transpired prior. This could in turn lead him to finding more people with similar abilities to Lucy.

While it's been some time since the Freeman-led show was announced, the other potential option for Lucy 2 would be to explore what happened to Johansson's character after the ending of the first movie. Some audiences have found themselves still baffled by the original movie's ambiguous ending, and though a sequel would risk some viewers' appreciation of its lack of direct explanations, it is still possible for Besson or another filmmaker to come in and find a way to bridge the gap between the two sides without undermining the original, much like Denis Villeneuve with Blade Runner 2049 .

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Scarlet Johansson stars as the title character in Luc Besson's 2014 sci-fi thriller Lucy, where a young woman who's forced to work as a drug mule accidentally develops superhuman abilities after an experimental drug leaks into her system. She is pursued by drug lord Mr. Jang (Choi Min-sik) and helped by both Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman) and police captain Pierre Del Rio (Amr Waked) while she unlocks skills far beyond 10% of the human brain's capacity.