The movie Lucy starts off as an aggravated drama edging somewhat into the Horror genre. But once it gets going, it becomes a very entertaining sci-fi fantasy action thriller with a very simple plot and a very minimal core cast but executed very nicely.
The star of this movie is Scarlett Johansson who plays the role of Lucy herself and does a pretty good job of it. But we’re also treated to a decent performance by Morgan Freeman as a ground-breaking professor, and a great performance by Amr Waked as a French police captain.
This movie has shades of The Matrix, as well as the movie Venom, but is unequivocally its own thing. It’s all about a random bimbo who unwilfully takes a revolutionary drug that gradually unlocks the hidden capacity of her brain. Soon she reaches a tipping point – repairing, defending & modifying herself with ease. Then she seeks increasingly more knowledge and energy until she can eventually make herself immortal. The ideals pushed by this movie, of incessantly seeking knowledge and power, like some kind of drug, are drawn from Luciferianism – hence the name Lucy. Here’s a rough translation of a quote from Laozi to counter that narrative: when you seek knowledge, you gain every day; when you seek peace, you lose every day – lose, lose and lose again, until you have nothing left to lose and nothing left to do, then there’s nothing more to do.
Even though it’s such a short & simple movie, over in less than 90 minutes, because it’s such a great concept and so well executed, I rate Lucy (2014) about equal to Divergent from the same year, and about equal to Scarlett’s other nice sci-fi movie Ghost In The Shell (2017).
ps. Did you notice the glass bottle of Evian water, used by Choi Min-Sik playing Mr Jang, the main baddie in this movie, to rinse the blood off his hands in one of the earlier scenes? That’s my main drink right there (the water, not the blood) unless I’m near a good natural source, which can be even better. Glass bottled Evian is available from Amazon and many other retailers online.
