Philosophical Matrix-esque Sci-Fi

Rating: 8/10 (4 July 2015)

I watched Lucy twice, in part because I wanted to write a fair review and make sure that I understood what actually happened. At the end of the first viewing, I felt that the final line that "now you know what to do" was a bizarre non sequitur. That has not changed.
Nonetheless, I find that the concept was creative enough and the cinematography excellent. The philosophical message strikes me as rather nihilistic. Basically, the drug which transforms Lucy into a kind of cyborg creature before she "dies" (becoming akin to God!) is a version of the "performance enhancement" meds being used liberally in modern Western societies. The people who take Provigil and Adderall, etc., all maintain that they function better and more quickly. In reality, they are just doing what they did before only more of it faster. In other words, these drugs do not transform an average person into a genius. Rather, they cause people to believe that they are brilliant, when in fact they are no different than they ever were. Who cares if you can carry out a mundane task ten times faster? That just means that you have become more efficient at producing whatever nonsense you were producing all along. A thousand times zero is still zero.
In this film, the ueber-performance enhancement drug accidentally ingested by Lucy grants her the capacity to make new neuronal connections so fast that she is able to process data like a computer. In fact, she really becomes a computer--losing all human emotions and qualities in the process. In some ways, Lucy harks back to the Matrix. There are plenty of other film references here, too, including the incredibly annoying and shameless theft of the opening of 2001 A Space Odyssey. (Was that legal, I wonder? I presume Kubrick, may he rest in peace, was not consulted.)
Lucy is filled with lots of death and destruction, so it probably sated the action-adventure crowd even while posing some pretty deep questions about the meaning of human existence and offering up a pretty dismal diagnosis that we are going nowhere and doing nothing. Indeed, if not for time, the film explains at some point, we would not even exist! The person who wrote this script obviously never studied the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, according to whom time is a category imposed on reality by the human mind. We run into a serious chicken-egg quandary, if Kant is right...
If there is any significant "message" here (which many reviewers deny), it is something like this: Knowledge is power, but only incomplete knowledge generates the need for power. Once knowledge is perfect, then power can only implode on itself. The take-away? Ignorance is bliss. In other words, one might read this film as advocating that human beings revert to simple hedonism and give up the quest for information accumulation, since it will eventually lead to their ruin. Is this message depressing, or is it liberating?
Will anyone be seduced into believing the arguably nihilistic subtext of Lucy? I doubt it. Most people will just roll with the corpses and crashed cars.