Hidden Gems

Rating: 8/10 (2 June 2016)

Only 8 out of 10 because the author/screenwriter made too many assumptions about the audience. With over 900 reviews posted I don't know if anyone has touched on my point or not. So here goes. Many of the references will only be caught by sci-fi fans over the age of 30 who also paid strict attention while in high school or college. That's not a jab at anyone's intelligence. There are simply not many people who find quantum theory exciting. The movie attempts to give a visualization to this not-so-well understood school of thought. Combining fiction along with real science is not easy to do while keeping it entertaining at the same time. An example reference is with the oversized USB flash drive shown at the end. Did anyone else notice it was "full of stars"? Not glitter...stars. Yep, that's a 2001/2010 A Space Odyssey monolith reference. The shape of the drive along with the stars was a dead giveaway. Whenever a monolith appears in 2001 it is always followed by a major evolutionary jump. What was Lucy experiencing? An evolution of consciousness. What was Lucy seeing during her armchair travel through time? If you also said "evolution" then you are correct. She saw the evolution of life on earth as well as the evolution of time and the entire universe itself. Lucy went a step further than 2001/10 in that it shows the interconnections with ALL things at the quantum level and beyond. This is just one of the references in the movie that kept me entertained throughout. The main problem with these kinds of references is that they usually don't translate very well when shown on the screen. Deeper explanations also tend to bore the heck out of an audience so they wind up on the cutting room floor. Again, it's not an audience intelligence issue. It's an audience familiarity issue. Assuming that the audience is as excited and as deeply interested in the same heavy topics as is the writer will usually make for bad ratings and a "meh" movie.