Lucy (2014 film)

Lucy
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Luc Besson
Written by	Luc Besson
Produced by	Virginie Silla
Starring	Scarlett Johansson Morgan Freeman Amr Waked Choi Min-sik
Cinematography	Thierry Arbogast
Edited by	Luc Besson
Music by	Éric Serra
Production company	EuropaCorp
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Release dates	25 July 2014 (2014-07-25) (United States) 6 August 2014 (2014-08-06) (France)
Running time	89 minutes
Countries	France
Language	English
Budget	$40 million
Box office	$54,308,355

Lucy is a 2014 French action film directed, written and edited by Luc Besson, and produced by Besson and Europacorp. It was released on July 25, 2014. The film was shot in Taipei, Paris and New York City. It stars Scarlett Johansson as the title character, along with Morgan Freeman playing Professor Norman.

Plot

Lucy is a 25-year-old American woman living and studying in Taipei, Taiwan. She is tricked into working as a drug mule by her new boyfriend, whose employer is a Korean mob boss and drug lord named Mr. Jang. Lucy delivers a briefcase to Mr. Jang containing a highly valuable synthetic drug called CPH4. Lucy is captured and a bag of the drug is forcibly sewn into Lucy's abdomen and that of others who will also transport the drug for sales in Europe. While Lucy is in captivity, one of her captors kicks her in the stomach, breaking the bag, releasing a large quantity of the drug into her system. As a result, she begins acquiring increasingly powerful mental talents and enhanced physical capabilities, such as absorbing information instantaneously, telekinesis, mental time travel, and can choose not to feel pain or other discomforts, in addition to other abilities. She kills off her present captors and escapes.

Lucy travels to a nearby hospital to get the bag of drugs removed from her abdomen. The bag is successfully removed, and Lucy realizes that she requires the bags inside the other three drug mules in order to continue expanding her neural capacity and that the process of rapid cell growth the drug is stimulating will eventually kill her. Returning to Mr. Jang's hotel, Lucy assaults him and telepathically extracts the locations of all three drug mules from his mind.

At her shared apartment, Lucy begins researching her condition and contacts a well-known scientist and doctor, Professor Samuel Norman, whose research may be the key to saving her. After Lucy speaks with the professor and provides proof of her developed abilities, she flies to Paris and contacts a local police captain, Pierre Del Rio, to help her find the remaining three packets of the drug. Her powers continue to grow, leaving her able to mentally disable an entire police force and the men who made her a drug mule. Lucy recovers the drug and must hurry to meet Professor Norman, with whom she agrees to share everything she now knows, after he points out that the main point of life is to pass on knowledge. Jang and the mob also want the drug and a gunfight ensues with the French police.

In the professor's lab, Lucy gives a speech about the nature of time and life and how people's humanity distorts their perceptions. At her urging, Lucy is intravenously injected with the contents of all four remaining bags of CPH4. Her body begins to change color and spread over computers and other objects in the lab, as she gains energy to create a supercomputer that will contain all of her information about the universe. She then begins a spacetime journey, eventually reaching the oldest discovered ancestor of mankind, implied to be Lucy, and touches fingertips with her. Meanwhile, back in the lab, Mr. Jang enters and points a gun at Lucy's head from behind, intending to kill her. He shoots, but in an instant before the bullet strikes, Lucy disappears within the space time continuum, where she explains that everything is connected and existence is only proven through time. Only her clothes and the supercomputer are left behind. Del Rio enters and fatally shoots Mr. Jang. Norman takes a flash drive from the advanced supercomputer created by Lucy's body. Del Rio asks Professor Norman where Lucy is, and gets a text message: "I AM EVERYWHERE." An overhead shot of Mr. Jang's body follows with Lucy's voice heard off-screen: "Life was given to us a billion years ago, and now you know what to do with it."

Cast

• Scarlett Johansson as Lucy, a drug mule who is accidentally infected with a drug that enhances her abilities; Angelina Jolie was originally cast as Lucy, but dropped out of the role prior to filming.
• Morgan Freeman as Professor Samuel Norman
• Choi Min-sik as Jang
• Amr Waked as Del Rio
• Pilou Asbaek
• Mason Lee
• Analeigh Tipton
• Frédéric Chau
• Claire Tran
• Christophe Tek
• Jan Oliver Schroeder
• Yvonne Gradelet
• Paul Chan
• Michél Raingeval

Production

The film Lucy is the second largest budget French film production for the year 2013 with an estimate of 49 million euro. It is also one of the biggest productions for EuropaCorp, the company founded by Luc Besson in 2000.

Filming started in September 2013 at the Cité du Cinéma, a new megastudio located on the outskirts of Paris. According to EuropaCorp CEO Christophe Lambert, this film had the highest budget in the company's history. He also stated that Luc Besson had never put so many special effects into a movie. On 5 September 2013, scenes were shot at the cliffs of Étretat in northern France.

Filming in Taipei, Taiwan, began on October 21, 2013 and lasted for eleven days. One of the locations filmed at was Taipei 101, one of the world's tallest skyscrapers. Select footage was filmed with IMAX cameras.

On October 23, The Hollywood Reporter stated that Besson had become enraged by all the media attention the shoot was getting that day. Rumors circulated that Besson was so frustrated with the constant disruptions that he considered leaving Taipei to film elsewhere. Meeting reporters in Taipei a day after he finished shooting the Taiwan part of the film, Besson blasted the media. "We don't want pictures with new dresses of Scarlett," he said. "Sometime [sic] I lost a bit of my concentration because I'm bothered by that." Because of constant paparazzi intrusions he said that "shooting at night time was a nightmare". Besson singled out two unnamed agencies from Hong Kong for special condemnation. News reports emerged that he wanted to leave Taiwan early to register his disapproval of their actions, but Besson labelled these as incorrect.

Release

On April 2, 2014, the first trailer for Lucy was released. It was described as having "hit the Internet with the force of a punch to the head," with reviewers stating that it is "promis[in]g a wild ride with Johansson rendering people unconscious with a flick of her wrist," "awesome" as "the girl who was once exploited becomes very, very dangerous," and "wonderfully insane as Johansson goes from a drug mule at the mercy of her captors to a superhuman with remarkable control over her body and a diminishing capacity for mercy." After the film premiered, however, its trailers were categorized as being starkly different than how the film actually plays out; for example, the film not being as action-packed. A behind the scenes preview of the film was released on July 10. On July 25, the film opened at 3,172 theaters in the United States.

Critical reception

Lucy has been met with mixed and polarizing critical reviews, with sentiment largely being that the film is silly but entertaining. On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a score of 61%, based on 145 reviews, with a rating average of 6 out of 10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Enthusiastically silly, Lucy tries to power through its logical gaps with cheesy thrills and Scarlett Johansson's charm – and partly succeeds." On review aggregator Metacritic, Lucy has a rating score of 61 out of 100, based on 40 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a C+ grade, on a scale of A to F.

Justin Chang of Variety called Lucy "a slickly engineered showcase for a kickass heroine whom we instinctively, unhesitatingly root for" and an enjoyable, "agreeably goofy, high-concept" speculative narrative devoid of self-importance because "it pays deft, knowing homage to any number of Hollywood sci-fi head-trip classics, embedding its ideas in a dense labyrinth of cinematic references that somehow end up feeling sly rather than shopworn." Jordan Hoffman of The Guardian called the film "mindless and mixed up, but propulsive and fun" and added that "Scarlett Johansson shines in this pseudo-intellectual action flick that represents Luc Besson's finest work" since the film The Fifth Element; he gave Lucy 3/5 stars, while IGN's Jim Vejvoda rated the film a 7.2 and said "this movie is all about Johansson, who's in almost every scene. She ably plays the title character as she transforms from average person to omnipotent entity" and "ultimately, more of Lucy works than doesn't. It's a fun movie even if its 'science' more than strains suspension of disbelief. It's a credit to Besson's style and Johansson's performance that Lucy isn't a train wreck." The San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle said, "You can scoff at Besson's philosophies and hypotheses, but to do that would miss what's in front of you. Lucy is an impeccably realized vision of Besson's view of things."

By contrast, John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter stated that "plenty of films and novels have envisioned what would happen if we gained conscious control over our entire brain," but that "it's hard to recall one whose ideas were more laughable than this one." He stated that the audience may "roll with the film" as Lucy does things beyond human capability, but that the film does not justify "Lucy's increasingly godlike abilities, which soon include time travel and levitation. Every now and then, a nugget of real philosophy is dropped into the screenplay, but it's surrounded by so much blather that even a generous viewer has trouble using it to justify what Lucy experiences." Writing for LA Weekly, Amy Nicholson stated that Besson "must think the audience is operating with even fewer synapses [than the capacity of ten percent]. Here, his style is slick but hand-holdingly literal" and "as the newly bionic Lucy seeks vengeance, Besson even tries to convince us she's a strong female character, which to the majority of male action directors simply means a sexy, silent badass. The real females in the audience may wonder why a genius would limp across a multi-continental gunfight in five-inch Louboutins."

Among the film's main criticisms are the ten percent of brain myth, Lucy becoming less empathetic and more robotic as her brain capacity increases, her invincibility, and the use of animal imagery to convey "obvious points." Ralph Blackburn of Belfast Telegraph called the notion of only using ten percent of the brain an "often-quoted idea" that "has obvious Hollywood potential," but, according to leading neuroscientists, is "nothing more than an urban myth." He cited neuropsychology professor Barbara Sahakian, quoting that "it's impossible to work out how much of our brain we are using quantitatively. However, it is definitely much more than 10 per cent." Chang stated that because Besson "seems more interested in engaging, playfully yet seriously, with the various biological, philosophical and metaphysical riddles that [the film] raises," the story is lacking as an action film and is not "much of a thriller – it's virtually an anti-thriller, devoid of suspense or any real sense of danger due to the fact that its heroine is more or less invincible," and that "at times it's hard to shake the sense that a smarter, more unbridled picture might have found a way to slip the bonds of genre altogether." Like Chang, DeFore felt that one of the flaws with the film is Lucy's invincibility because it "nullifies much of the drama to come." Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune said that the first twenty minutes of the film are good, but that by half an hour of runtime, the audience will realize that Lucy has no limits, which makes the film dull after a while with a "limited payoff". The Boston Globe's Ty Burr, on the other hand, stated of the criticisms: "who comes to a Besson movie seeking logic? Lucy stays true to its own invented physics."

Lucy has been compared to various films; common examples include Akira, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix, The Tree of Life, Transcendence, and especially Limitless. Chang said, "Lucy's gradual rise to omniscience and omnipotence recalls Neo's own such journey in The Matrix, while her many black-suited Korean opponents suggest another army of Agent Smiths," and added that, when Lucy "uploads herself, Big Brother-style, to every computer and TV screen in the vicinity," the film suggests "a livelier, less ponderous remake" of Transcendence. Hoffman said, "The end of the movie goes completely off the rails, but in a way that is charming in its stupidity. It's like 2001: A Space Odyssey for those with short attention spans, and those people need to have their minds blown, too, I suppose." Matt Prigge of Metro New York, while calling the film "stupid, smart and awesome," stated that it "smartly goes in a wildly different direction than the amusingly amoral Limitless, in which Bradley Cooper's character abused a similar drug, but used it to gain success, money and power. He was selfish. Lucy is selfless." Prigge added, "If Lucy is Limitless, it's Limitless with more than a dash of The Tree of Life, and even a bit" of the film Under the Skin, which also stars Johansson. Burr commented that "where a fully juiced cerebellum just made Cooper's character really, really capable, Lucy undergoes a metaphysical makeover that, by the film's midpoint, has started to rearrange time, space, and her body." Besson also compared the film, stating that he intended for the first part to be like Léon: The Professional (which he also wrote and directed), the second part to be like Inception and the third part to be like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Comparing Lucy's powers to characters Professor X, The Doctor, Dr. Manhattan, Galactus, God from Bruce Almighty, Scarlet Witch, and Tetsuo from Akira, Hollywood.com's Jordan Smith stated that "Lucy may be the most powerful film character ever created," but indicated that Tetsuo's powers might match hers.

Box office

Lucy opened with $17.1 million, placing it in the top spot for the box office opening weekend, ahead of the competing film Hercules, which debuted in the number two spot with an estimated $11 million. Lucy, described as "bringing a needed boost to the ailing summer box office," did financially better than expected, as early box office estimates for the film placed it "on track for $14 million to $15 million on Friday, including $2.7 million from 2,386 late Thursday screenings." Lucy earned $44 million at the domestic box office for the opening weekend, with Hercules remaining at second place with $29 million. The audience for Lucy was split evenly between men and women, with 65 percent being over age 25.

Thewire.com's David Sims stated that Johansson's success with Lucy at the box office would be "no mean feat given that it's a European R-rated action movie opening against a PG-13 epic with a more proven action star" in Dwayne Johnson (The Rock). "She's obviously had supporting roles in Marvel blockbusters but [Johansson] has never opened a blockbuster as an above-the-title star," he stated, adding that The Island was her first real attempt at doing so, but was a flop, and that if "tracking holds, Lucy will solidify this new phase in Johansson's career as a marquee name." Leading in the weekend's ticket sales on online ticket service Fandango, Lucy also outsold other action thrillers Oblivion, Elysium and Edge of Tomorrow "at the same point in the sales cycle." It additionally outsold The Bourne Legacy ($38.1 million) and Salt ($36 million), compared to their opening weekend spots, but failed to surpass the opening weekend grosses for Wanted ($50.9 million) and Taken 2 ($49.5 million). Ray Subers of Box Office Mojo stated, "The fact that it even came close, though, is a fairly remarkable feat for this moderately-budgeted original action movie."

Nikki Rocco, president for domestic distribution at Universal Studios, said that widespread interest from ticket buyers indicated that Lucy brought "a different side to an action film," and that Universal Studios "had maintained high hopes for the 'R-rated original concept female-driven action movie.'" Subers said that there are a few contributing factors to Lucy's success, commenting, "First, the movie had an intriguing premise (what if we could use more than 10% of our brains?) that was front-and-center in action-packed, visually-stunning advertisements." He said that this helped Johansson's lead role of Lucy appear to be "a natural extension of the butt-kicking brand she's built" as Black Widow in The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and that "recognizing that audiences were connecting with the material, Universal made the savvy decision to move Lucy up from mid-August," where it instead would have been competing with Guardians of the Galaxy, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Expendables 3, a contrast to "this less-competitive late July date."

Possible sequel

In an April 2014 WonderCon interview, Besson was asked about the possibility of a Lucy sequel and stated, "With Lucy, you’ll see the end of the film. I don’t know how we can make a sequel, but if the film is huge, then I will think about it."

Graphic novel

Hollywood journalist Nikki Finke reported in a July 26, 2014 post on her film industry blog that: "In August, a Lucy graphic novel will be released online with four chapters appearing every other day for one week." No further details were provided.

See also

• Transhumanism in fiction

External links

• Official website
• Lucy at IMDb
• International trailer