Lucy

Revisiting Lucy after all these years, I found myself still enjoying it. Scarlett Johansson's presence on screen is never unwelcome. The story was simple yet engaging, with a good sense of pace and humor. Even though I have my own opinions on various scientific and pseudo-scientific concepts, when Morgan Freeman delivers them, I'm more than willing to suspend disbelief for a moment. The film was classic Besson: packed with action, Asian gangsters, and impressive special effects. The whole spectacle kept me entertained. What got me was how I could switch off my brain while watching a movie about maximizing brain capacity. / Lesson learned: If you have any say in it, never let anyone stitch anything inside your body. Not more than three cigarettes under the skin in case of a shipwreck. (27/06/2022)

Lucy is a magnificent roller-coaster ride through the mind of a mad fantasist in which anything is possible. Besson has always been a wonderful storyteller, but it is time to realise that seriousness, rationality and reality are binding for any bard. For Besson, the turning point came with The Fifth Element, where he cast off the shackles and turned toward stories to which boundaries do not apply. Even though he has seemingly come back down to Earth in the past twenty years, he has always adhered to that liberating realisation that as long as the result is coherent in its logic, it is not necessary to limit oneself with rationality. Projects such as Taken are not momentary awakenings from the fever dream, but merely proof that he is able to tell “believable” tales when he is so inclined. But for the most part, he simply doesn’t want to do that, and it’s up to every viewer whether or not they will accept the game of an “unreliable” narrator (in world cinema, Tsui Hark is the only one with whom we can compare Besson). To wonder over Lucy’s absurd sci-fi new-age premise is like watching a roller coaster instead of strapping yourself into a seat and enjoying the ride. The fact that Besson doesn’t set aside this phantasmagoria for even a moment, but instead presents his narrative with a straight face and takes it to its internally logical conclusion is not a sign of madness, but of storytelling brilliance. It is necessary to add that the storyteller’s straight face does not in any way mean that he is telling a serious story. On the contrary, Lucy stands right at the edge of absorbing entertainment and camp, but never slides into it, and therein lies its distinctiveness. Besson never peeked at viewers, but only gazed at them with open eyes, in which it was so easy and delightful to drown. In the context of his work, Lucy is something like The Fifth Element 2.0, though it differs from the first version by inverting the initial elements and adjusting the narrative devices. Instead of the fate of all life, what is at stake here is the existence of a single being, which, however, is the universe itself. Instead of Willis’s cynical hero, behind which stumbles the personification of good, here we have a formulaic cop in the position of an appendage of the universe. And whereas part of the fun of The Fifth Element was built on breaking up space by using editing to turn the monologues of distant characters into dialogues, Lucy entertains by putting the power over space, time, people and matter, which was previously possessed only by filmmakers, in the hands of its heroine, as well as by interconnecting the plot with external narrative elements and hypertextual references. (21/05/2015)

Scarlett is hot but has absolutely nothing to work with, the story has potential but is mired in a horribly shoddy earnestness, and Besson does present some good visual ideas, but for today's mainstream this nutcase is simply unusable and uninteresting. To limit a world in which almost everything is allowed to a few anti-gravity shenanigans and the transformation of matter like something out of B-grade sci-fi from the 80s takes a great deal of filmmaker's pathology. (28/02/2017)

Blatant guilty pleasure! I think that Besson saw Space Odyssey and wanted to shoot something similar, but in his own way and on an earthly scale. The result is a total mishmash from hands of an over-keen geek mistaking this thing for that, who cares about reality... But the entertainment factor is on maximum and Morgan Freeman’s gibberish about the capacity of the brain blends together with neat action scenes where anything is possible (The Matrix gone crazy) and planets that explode. They’ve even got dinosaurs! Awful claptrap that I wouldn’t hesitate putting on again sometime. Scarlett looks great of course and manages the acting fairly well. New Age Fifth Element. (02/01/2015)

Lucy is a very strange film, on the one hand it captivates with its theme and execution, on the other hand it raises many questions and offers many illogical points. The idea itself is imaginative, a bit controversial, yet noteworthy. Who knows what would have happened if 100% had actually been achieved. Almost any scenario can be offered within the sci-fi genre in this regard, yet at times I thought it was a bit much. Nevertheless, I must praise the initial interweaving of the fiction sequences with the documentary footage, which together corresponded perfectly, and last but not least the magical music by Eric Serra. In short, a film that I admit I didn't fully understand, which isn't always a bad thing, but in this case it affected my judgement. (23/08/2014)