By turns horrific, transcendent, sad, and beautiful.

Rating: 10/10 (6 August 2014)

Now, my love of everything Luc Besson is well known. I'd watch him mow grass, so do I love Monsieur Besson. And Lucy is very likely my favorite Besson film since The Fifth Element (1997), though other strong contenders include Angel A (2005) and Les aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010). In fact, in some ways, Lucy is a reworking of the central theme of The Fifth Element: The appearance of a woman who is a "supreme being." Scarlett Johansson is excellent in the title role, and I also enjoyed the performances of Min-sik Choi and Amr Waked. Johansson brings to her role an unexpectedly – for me at least – poignant portrayal of a woman whose humanity is being eroded as she becomes something entirely, unimaginably alien. She actually had me near tears twice. The effects are gorgeous, and we are propelled through time, from 2014 to that "time" prior to the Big Bang. The editing, as with The Fifth Element, is superb. And, as usual, Besson works with his tried-and-true collaborators, such as Eric Serra (soundtrack) and Thierry Arbogast (cinematography).
That said, the science is, well, not really science at all. The entire film is predicated on the "Ten percent of brain myth." This is, of course, complete twaddle. Also, Morgan Freeman's lectures are replete with errors that would have been eliminated by throwing a few bucks at a poor biology grad student. Or checking Wikipedia. For example, we're told at least a couple times that life appeared one billion years ago, when, in fact, the earliest evidence we currently have of life on Earth is 3.7 billion years old. That's a pretty damn big error. And there was a bunch of foolishness about dolphins. However! Truth is, these problems actually didn't detract from the film at all, in my opinion. I think you have to look at what's happening in Lucy as metaphor, and where it takes us in the end is very near to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I give Lucy high marks. It is by turns horrific, transcendent, sad, and beautiful.