First hour great fun

Rating: Null/10 (27 August 2014)

Flamboyant French director Luc Besson has a penchant for making movies featuring strong young women - think Mathilda (Natalie Portman) in Leon, the titular heroine (Anne Parillaud) in "La Femme Nikita", and Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) in "The Fifth Element". A similar idea of a youngster turned into a fighting machine was offered us in "Hanna".
This time, we have the eponymous Lucy - a great role for the beautiful and talented Scarlett Johansson - who is an American in Taiwan who suddenly finds herself ingesting a new super-drug than enables her to use progressively more and more of her mind with ultimately universal implications. If this sounds a bit like the plot premise of "Limitless" where NZT has been replaced by CPH4, then you can count on Besson for taking the notion further, much further, too far in fact. What starts as fun and merely fanciful finishes up as metaphysical nonsense. There are echoes here of all sorts of previous films such as "2001" (there are stargates aplenty) and "The Tree Of Life" (there is another dinosaur) and - inevitably - "The Matrix" (remember Trinity?).
The work is visually stunning with an eclectic collection of images ranging from wildlife to cityscape to biology to cosmology and, since I saw it on an IMAX screen, at times I was close to hallucinating. The soundtrack adds to the atmospherics with use of Mozart's "Requiem" and contemporary songs (don't miss the one used for the long credits sequence). And the cast is very watchable with the Korean Choi Min-sik as lead bad guy and the ever-cool Morgan Freeman as lead scientist. Unusually for such an ambitious film, it clocks in a mere one and half hours and I would have been happier with a second hour in the vein of the first. But, heh, it's never boring.