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Why Lucy was the stand-out of the summer.
Summer sleeper hit Lucy debuts on Blu, Stanley Kubrick gets another boxset and Pulp Fiction celebrates its 20th Anniversary. Plus, Lounge looks forward to the most promising gaming treats of 2015.
LUCY 15
OUT 12 JANUARY DVD, BD
Looking at UK box office receipts for summer 2014, there is an anomaly. Nestled amid the Marvel epics, small-screen spin-offs and monster remakes, all of whose success could have been projected in advance, Luc Besson’s wholly original Lucy sticks out like a sore thumb. A defiantly weird one.
Standalone sci-fi is becoming a tougher and tougher sell – acclaimed Tom Cruise vehicle Edge Of Tomorrow being the latest sad reminder only weeks before Lucy’s release – and as a director, it’s been years since Besson had a major hit. So why did Lucy defy the odds and succeed so far beyond anyone’s expectations?
The simple answer has to be Scarlett Johansson. In the age of the expanded cinematic universe, it’s now widely acknowledged that franchises, not stars, are what sells. Actors alone don’t ‘open’ movies any more. And yet Johansson did, her feline features and phenomenal eyes the focal point of Lucy’s impactful marketing campaign. Her appeal goes well beyond the obvious: the crowds for Lucy were more evenly split gender-wise than is average for sci-fi, and by and large they get their money’s worth.
Forward thinking
A knowingly outlandish slice of B-movie fun, Lucy plays at times like a gender-flipped take on Crank: Johansson’s college student falls in with a bad crowd and ends up with a pouch of drugs sewn into her stomach, a substance that looks like Breaking Bad’s blue meth but is in fact something even headier. When the stuff begins to leak into her bloodstream, she’s transformed into a superhuman killing machine with vastly enhanced brainpower, but only days to live.
With this year’s sci-fi trio of Her, Under The Skin and Lucy, Johansson now does otherworldly on a level that no other actress can touch, although her performance here hews increasingly closer to Marvel’s stony Black Widow. In both Her and Under The Skin Johansson plays non-human creatures that gradually develop self-awareness and something like a soul, while her arc here is the reverse.
Yet Lucy’s transformation from ordinary girl to ruthless superhuman feels a few notches too quick, with Johansson asked to do little more than deliver ponderous exposition in a deliberately flattened manner. The exceptions are an
‘It’s a vibrant, eccentric
and silly genre flick, and proof that female-led sci-fi is not a box-office dead end’
emotionally potent scene in which Lucy phones home to speak to her mum, and a subtler one as she bids a tacit farewell to her ditzy roommate (Analeigh Tipton), grasping for connection even as she feels her humanity fading.
Otherwise there’s very little time spent on the personal pain of Lucy’s transformation, or indeed on the body horror as her brain gradually colonises the rest of her, with Besson instead steering hard into the pseudo-science behind his script.
The notion that humans use only 10 per cent of our potential brainpower is now so widely acknowledged as bunkum that if you type the phrase into Google, “myth” is auto-filled as the next word. This wouldn’t matter except that Besson won’t allow five minutes to pass on-screen without a reference to this core idea, cutting away from the action to Morgan Freeman’s Professor Norman solemnly lecturing his students with factoids like “Dolphins are the only creatures that can use 20 per cent of their cerebral capacity.” Asked by a student what would happen if a person were to use 100 per cent of their brain, Norman admits he has no idea. And let’s be clear: neither does Besson. If this hypothetical scenario were ever to take place, it would almost certainly look nothing like the third act of Lucy, which alternates balls-out action with a specific brand of bonkers that recalls, of all things, The Tree Of Life.
Plane crazy
But, for or all its gobbledegook logic and baffling jump cuts, Lucy just works. At a lean 89 minutes it’s as ruthlessly efficient as its heroine, propelled by a gloriously simple central device that plays out unimpeded by subplots. With one or two restrained moments of exploitative nastiness – Lucy is manhandled, forcibly inseminated with drugs and later pawed by a leery thug – Besson effectively sets up such a potent desire for her to fight back that every beat of action thereafter is a thrill, even when she’s levitating her opponents rather than actively engaging them.
Better still is one gloriously surreal plane ride during which Lucy’s cells begin to literally crumple under the weight of her mutation, leading into a visually strange and lovely sequence. There are moments amid the evolutionary pondering that resonate, even if you sense Besson has stumbled upon them by luck rather than design. “We’ve codified our existence to bring it down to human size,” Lucy muses, reminding us that numbers, letters and systems are non-existent except by human design. This is no less intelligible or thought provoking an idea than anything expressed in, say, Interstellar, and Lucy has brevity on its side.
Overall, Lucy works best when it’s not trying to evolve beyond its capacity: it’s a vibrant, eccentric and riotously silly genre flick, not a lofty fable about humanity. More importantly it’s proof that original, female-led science fiction is not a box office dead end – with a leading lady like Johansson, it’s the opposite. Here’s hoping studios take note. DVD is bare bones, though Blu-ray offers two featurettes, The Evolution Of Lucy (16 mins) and Cerebral Capacity: The True Science Of
Lucy (10 mins), neither of which were available for review. > Extras Featurettes