Thursday 28 August 2014

Lucy (film review)

Lucy (2014 film) poster.jpg
"Lucy (2014 film) poster"
by via Wikipedia.
It's very obvious that Luc Besson draws his influences from Franco-Belgian comic strips and Japanese manga/anime. Just yesterday afternoon, I was watching an anime which used the 'person morphing into weird black tubes' trope. The question is, can Besson's totally fantastical plots stand the transition to real people and settings?

It helps that his actors are larger than life. Their personalities and presence exceeded the weight of the story. Scarlett Johanssen looked as cool as a cucumber lifting baddies to the ceiling with a wave of her hand. I have a real soft spot for Amr Waked as the French cop. Morgan Freeman also has a tendency to turn up in films I like. In this case, he sounded as if he couldn't quite believe what he was saying, which was a good call on his part. If I could have reduced my brain capacity by about 90% maybe I would have been impressed by the 'premise' of Lucy. As it was, it contained so much random pseudo-scientific bullshit, it's hard to single out just one strand, and poor old Freeman bore the weight of imparting it to us. Lucy herself just had the acid trip of a lifetime. It must be hard to display genius beyond the reach of ordinary human understanding, such that we ordinary humans can grasp it. Yeah...

Was there anything buried here for the skeptical magician to get her teeth into? Well, it is quite impressive how we humans have such an intense awareness of the quantity and shape of our ignorance. In a way, it's as interesting as animal self-consciousness, but less well researched as far as I know. Can a dolphin discern the existence of unexplored land masses and wonder what they're like? Can a symbol using chimpanzee note our use of symbols it doesn't understand? Does it realise that another chimpanzee knows things it doesn't? I have no idea, but we can do all those things and more. No wonder we have a perpetual sense of limitation when we see beyond our limits all the time. And no wonder we're able to imagine the limits being lifted.

No comments:

Post a Comment