Drug gives heroine 100% use of her brain

Rating: 7/10 (6 August 2014)

Luc Besson's Lucy is like the 1960's mythology of mind-expanding drugs — on steroids.
Like Kubrick's 2001 it elaborates a cosmic history on a simple plot. In yet another of Scarlett Johansson's Otherworldly Woman roles, an unwitting drug mule ends up infused with a powerful new drug that raises her use of her brain capacity from our normal ten percent (wrong scientifically but not a bad sci-fi premise, or explanation of current politics) to 100%. By that time she has controlled other people and material objects, time travelled and turned herself into and back out of a computer. Women are good at multi-tasking, in contrast to the fatally obsessive guys here.
Besson has always liked strong, effective women at the centre of his plots. He confronts man's primeval dread of woman's power, the neurotic reason for her suppression. Lucy is both a feminization of auteur Luc and the name given a three million year old skeleton of a hominid, so she's both a person and an anthropological myth.
Normally a loose, hip airhead, this Lucy's drug dose is implanted in her lower belly, so she discovers it in an image of both defloration and periodic cleansing. The drug erupts when a rejected man kicks her in the belly. That — and its first usage — makes the power a physical projection of her feminist rage at powerful men's abuse if women. No other woman has a significant role in the film — we meet only her airier head roomie and a tattooist — because Lucy is Woman.
Lucy opens the film saying "Life was given us a billion years ago. What have we done with it?" She ends it with "Life was given us a billion years ago. Now you know what you can do with it."
The latter invites "Shove it!" because most of the humanity we see here is venal, vicious, corrupt. But we also get Morgan Freeman as the humanistic sage who offers such illuminating bromides as "We humans are more concerned with having than being." He probably just missed Woodstock too. But Freeman's scientist and an earnest Parisian cop are enough to give the film's view of humanity an upbeat turn. What we can do with it is live as if knowledge and morality matter. We can try to be aware. That's what the inserts of molecular and astronomical fireworks boil down to.