just watched lucy last night and it was terrible. its like michael bay removed all the slightly fun stuff he does and pretended to be smart.
i actually wrote an essay-lite two months ago about the opposite opinion, or close to the opposite,
and now i have an excuse to copy and paste thousands of words
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This is an essay about Luc Besson’s movie Lucy. Two things before we begin:
One: There are spoilers for this movie below, but that’s almost entirely meaningless because of what this movie is: complete nonsense. I’ve devoted many words below to talk about why that nonsense is particularly compelling, but it’s nonsense. Reading this without having seen the movie will change absolutely nothing about your experience if you end up seeing it. If you do see it, I recommend watching it bleary-eyed at a very early hour of morning on a laptop screen. Four in the morning sounds good.
Two: This film is disgustingly, flagrantly racist by accident (in that it doesn’t think it’s racist) and by design (because it still totally is), and the more I think about it, the worse it really is. I loved a lot of the rest of this film but please keep in mind (because I’m discussing mostly what this film does well) that this film’s treatment of China and, really, Asia in general, is just as realistic and reverent as its treatment of science and physics.
With that out of the way:
I'm having a lot of trouble starting this essay because Lucy is the kind of movie that needs hundreds of words to unpack while also absolutely capable of being summarized in under five words. You could say "a girl becomes the universe" or "Lucy feels like snorting cocaine” and both would be true but they’re not complete. To be completely true about Lucy is to put yourself on its level, but that experience is like endlessly having a rug pulled from under you without ever getting a chance to hit the ground. You spin forever.
To illustrate: the titular character starts talking with her boyfriend, Richard; the name is apt. Every time the two of them says something, we do a Scott Pilgrim-esque visual gag cut to a related image. It happens enough times that it’s disorienting, and it doesn’t let up. By the point when Lucy ends up dragged away by men against her will the intercut has shown a cheetah catching its prey, and we’re like fuck you, movie. We get it. We know what’s going on, here. But while it’s distracting us with the complete dumbness of that, the disorientation from the intercutting and the pacing (which is quick as hell) remains, and the very next thing is an unrelated scene featuring Morgan Freeman.
You must assume that a film is built to work with no audience preconceptions; in other words, a film should function without marketing or trailers coloring it. By that token, at this point in the film, we know nothing about the premise. The film takes its momentum, built up from cutting back and forth between obvious metaphor and dumb action, and stops it cold; it feels like a car crash. Before ten minutes have even passed, you start to feel dizzy, and then Morgan Freeman starts talking to you. He’s at a podium; we, the audience, are surrogates for the audience in the auditorium. And we listen, because what else can we do?
Morgan Freeman starts discussing how brains work, and every single thing he says is completely untrue. This man, in the world of the film, is a world-renowned scientist. Every single time Morgan Freeman says another thing he pauses and does a very slight wince. He has to force himself to say these things because they’re that stupid. By the time he’s actually brought to a small groan by a line regarding our understanding of what would happen if a human brain “could use 60 percent of its potential,” the film cuts to a shot of a bunch of college students frantically taking notes on what he’s saying. Their typing is deafening, because what Morgan Freeman is saying is immeasurably interesting to them despite being otherworldy bullshit.
And you laugh. You might not realize why you laugh, but you laugh, almost assuredly. Lucy is a comedy where the joke is the structure of the film itself. It’s a joke played completely straight but still read as a joke. It’s one thing to make a stupid movie. It’s another thing to make a stupid movie and know it’s stupid and wink about it. Lucy is neither.
Lucy is a weirder, rarer thing. It’s completely aware that it’s immeasurably stupid at every turn but instead of joking about it, it is itself the joke, with the joke itself being completely sincere. Does that make sense? It’s as if someone found a solution to the inherent contradiction of trying to make a cult film on purpose. The Room is charmingly confusing because it’s so alien and doesn’t know it; if you tried to make a movie like The Room, the logic follows that because you’re self-aware you couldn’t replicate its charm. It gets irritating when you’re being winked at like that.
But Lucy doesn’t wink. It simply trusts that you accept it, and then it takes that trust and laughs. It uses brilliant filmmaking (legitimately top-notch editing, cutting, and acting) to build a sense of audience security that its events should not deserve. The effect is bizarre; you are in a complete suspension of disbelief while simultaneously being acutely aware of the lunatic unreality. And it pulls it off by constantly switching gears. Each time you’re getting a handle on the current brand of weirdness, it throws a wrinkle in. Lucy walks into a hospital with a gun and nobody notices, and she’s intent on medical treatment. She forces the doctors to operate on her and shoves the guy they were operating on off the table and says he was going to die anyway and they accept that, fine, sure, whatever. Your head is just beginning to formulate thoughts about how bullshit that is when she grabs the lead surgeon’s cell phone and calls her mom and says “I can feel the universe.” By the time you’ve begun adjusting enough to object to this she seriously tells her mom “I remember your milk in my mouth” and you’re distracted again. The whole movie is a series of pristinely timed distractions culminating in visual punchlines culminating in a dumb joke about existence itself. It’s incredibly balanced slight-of-hand trickery throughout.
Every piece of scientific or technological information is wrong but then instead of just being content with its wrongness it balloons that wrongness into oblivion. A good example: there’s frequent scenes of meaningless typing on laptops to represent “hacking” in that classic Hollywood way but they keep getting more and more flagrant until they culminate in Lucy type-hacking two laptops at once, one for each hand. A stewardess comes by to ask her to stop, at which point the film cuts to her left hand frantically type-hammering down on the trackpad, where there are no keys to hit. Then Lucy dissolves (she literally dissolves, into thin air, reforming later without a single mention as to how or why), and the rest of the film has zero scenes of computer use, accurate or otherwise, for the whole of its runtime.
A pretty succinct microcosm of the movie comes at the end. Lucy disappears. A man asks, frantically, where she is. Immediately, his cell phone gets a text message, and he picks it up. The camera crash-zooms in on the screen:
“I AM EVERYWHERE,” it says, and nothing else. The cell phone is a Motorola flip phone that looks like it came out of the early 2000s. There is a horror movie sting. Cut to Morgan Freeman holding a USB drive made out of stardust that holds the entirety of the universe.
It's riotously funny.
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so take that as you will
