"Lucy" (2014)

I went to see this last night so I figured it’s as good as any to be my first post here!

Brilliant film. Brilliant. (Well, I thought so!) The plot was mindboggling. I mean...how do you even come up with something like that? The detail, the research, the imagination – it was amazing. The film is written, directed and edited all by Luc Besson and I think he does a fantastic job.

The film follows a girl named Lucy, who gets caught up in a drug trafficking extravaganza. The opening of the movie is extremely tense. We’re thrown into it without much explanation. After being tricked by her boyfriend, Lucy has been forced into delivering a suitcase (of what, she doesn’t know) to a bunch of Korean mobsters who are staying in a hotel in Taiwan. She’s the innocent victim of course, not having done anything like this in her life. She’s scared to death, not being able to understand Korean (understandably) which just adds bucket loads to the tension for the audience. There were moments of this scene where I honestly thought for a minute that she was a gonner...but then I remembered, well, the whole film is named after her, so the likely hood that she would then die in the first scene is quite slim.

Having not watched the trailer, or really knowing anything about the film before going in to see it, I found myself trying to guess what genre I’d got myself into. The hugely tense music combined with the fact there were bloody feet being shown on the floor of the mobsters’ hotel room, my first instinct ran to horror. This got me excited and a little nervous (which in hindsight now, probably made it more tense for me than it would have otherwise) as I’ve never actually watched a horror film in the cinema before. However, as the film progressed I settled on thriller and I relaxed into it happily.

Lucy wakes up the following morning in the mobsters’ hotel room with a bandage wrapped around her stomach and heavy blood stains showing through it. They explain that they sewed a bag containing a hugely valuable synthetic drug into her stomach to be transported for sales in Europe. While in captivity, one of her captors kicks her stomach, breaking the bag, and releasing a heavy quantity of the drug into her system. I admit this scene reminded me of something like The Exorcist, which sort of made me raise an eyebrow. As a result of this however, Lucy begins acquiring increasingly powerful physical and mental capabilities, such as telepathy, telekinesis, and mental time travel. She also realises she can choose not to feel pain or other discomforts. Realising all of this, she efficiently kills her captors and escapes.

While this was going on, the film had been flicking back and forth between what first appears to be two plots which have nothing particularly to do with each other. Morgan Freeman plays Professor Norman, who is lecturing a class about how much of the brain animals and humans actually use. I found this piece of the film quite fascinating actually. It was so thought provoking because it goes beyond life, beyond time to all these things that will always be unfathomable. The concept suggested is not so far-fetched but believable, and as I say, quite mind-boggling. This, side plot I suppose you’d call it, then weaves into Lucy’s story later and it serves as background information to understand with more impact what is actually happening to her.

The rest of the film concentrates on Lucy trying to find the other drug mules who endured the same experience with the Korean mobsters as she did, and then find a way of preserving the infinite knowledge she is inadvertently acquiring. Morgan Freeman made the point that life’s existence is purely for passing down the knowledge through generation to generation, pretty much disclosing the idea of any afterlife or any special meaning to our lives, as we would like to believe. We are, apparently, just cells that have developed over an abundant amount of time. I found this quite fascinating, as I say.

I particularly liked the scene at the hotel as the editing here was brilliantly done. (The editing in the whole movie was done really well, actually). Through this, Lucy being “captured” by the mobsters is compared to a deer being hunted and killed by lions. It emphasises how vulnerable she is at this point, which makes the contrast between how powerful she becomes later even stronger.

I found there were a lot of close-up shots of eyes; particularly at the points the drug affected Lucy’s system. I thought this to be an interesting choice of transition into seeing inside her brain and her body as the drug takes effect. I read somewhere that the eye is considered a window to the soul, which makes it the perfect transitional opportunity. Very clever.

What I liked about this film too is that while it was an extremely intricate plot, it was never so confusing at anytime that I wasn’t able to follow it. The dialogue is written very well. It tells the story while also taking the concept slowly so the audience can keep up easily without it getting tedious. I’ve found some films can get so caught up in the action (the fighting and the chasing) that I get lost because the details have been put to the side in order to keep the film exciting, but this means it’s relying purely on audiences’ intuition to keep up. This isn’t always good, if like me, you can be a bit slow to grasp certain things at the necessary pace! Here, however, the balance is good. There wasn’t any moment where I had to sit back in frustration wondering ‘what the *beep* is going on?’

I think the casting was perfect. Scarlett Johansson played Lucy perfectly, needing to be believably vulnerable at the beginning, to a total transformation of appearing invincible later. Morgan Freeman was another perfect choice for lecturer, Professor Norman. I feel like this was a typical character portrayal for him; similar to those he’s done before, but nevertheless perfect.

I would definitely recommend this film. When I came out of the cinema the first thing I wanted to do was watch it again. There’s so much to take in and comprehend it really demands a second viewing. My friends and I were silent walking out, stuck for words, it was just so mind-boggling.

I hope I haven’t given away too much of the plot in here! To those who haven’t seen it yet, I apologise, but I think it’s all pretty much in the trailer anyway! Has anyone else seen it? I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions

WATCH TRAILER: