Monday, August 11, 2014

Lucy - Movie Review



Last Saturday I watched Lucy with some friends, since we were impressed by the trailer that we saw a trailer for it a few months ago before we watched Transcendence.

A funny thing happened before I went to see Lucy.  I thought about how there was Morgan Freeman playing the role of a scientist in Transcendence how he gets tangled up in the affairs of a science experiment gone wrong (in that case Will Caster, the scientist, uploading himself into a computer).  In Lucy, Freeman seems to have a repeat of the same role of a lead scientist - except this time the "experiment gone wrong" is Lucy, a woman who develops superpowers after the bag of drugs in her body leaks as a forced drug mule.  So there how the basic structure of Lucy didn't surprise me at all - I kind of saw what was coming my way already because Lucy turned out to be kind of similar to Transcendence (in some ways).

So anyways, more about what I thought about the movie.  The movie was fun to watch but I tried to ignore what the movie reviews had to say.  I mean, the critics always hate on the Resident Evil movies but I love all of those movies (almost as much as childhood favorites, but not quite there).

There was plenty of action.  Yes, lots of action.  This made the story very fast paced.  It's not impossible to get the story down but if you weren't paying attention, then you could easily miss some minor parts of the movie that will make the movie very strange, such as Lucy is studying in Taipei isn't explicitly stated at the very beginning - it's mentioned very quickly once the story gets going.

The ending was kind of surprising to my friends but I wasn't really surprised - I mean if you see what happened during the whole movie, there's not that many ways that this movie could end.  I thought the ending was appropriate.  It's not quite a cliff hanger but it is certainly a fast paced ending - fitting like how the whole movie was.

After I watched Lucy, I just felt that more could've been done with the movie.  I really thought there would be more instances where Lucy would display and utilize a vast variety powers.  Also the shady drug ring isn't really featured in the movie besides the scenes where they try to retrieve the drug.  The gang could've been something more in the movie - especially with its history or just more information about it.  I don't think it even had a name.

There seems to be some criticism about Lucy as a movie about the brain.  First off, if you knew that "the average human uses less than 10% of his/her brain" was a myth and Lucy is a big budget Hollywood movie, you wouldn't expect much meaningful artistic license concerning the human brain.  So don't expect this movie to be more than what is really is, because otherwise you have an unhealthy outlook on movies in general (especially sci-fi ones) and the only thing you'll achieve at most is hurting your own brain.

As a side note, the best way to watch this movie is to not see many trailers for it beside the brief ones they showed on TV or a while back in theaters before the feature presentations.  If you watch too many trailers on YouTube, you might end up disappointed because collectively all the unique trailers kind of use a scene from every major part of the movie (beginning, middle, and end... without spoiling what's really going on).

Essentially Lucy is a great movie to keep yourself entertained in the summer.  Just don't think too hard about the "real facts" in Lucy, especially about the brain, or else you'll definitely won't be developing amazing with your own brain.