Lucy (2014) - Scarlett Johansson

[OraBorealis]

I'm curious to know what people thought of this film.

I utterly LOVED the latter portion of it, but was still trying not to laugh my ass off at the first half hour of the film. Here's what I put on the Suggest-a-Trax page for Lucy.

The Pitch: Luc Besson's attempt at the record for world's most pretentious film. As fan service for lack of a Black Widow film, Scarlett Johansson pretentiously narrates while staring blankly off into space while an action film takes place around her. The film is punctuated throughout with rave videos from the Fantastic Voyage, LOADS of stock footage, and BIG. BOLD. PERCENTAGES! telling you how long you've been enduring the film. As an added bonus Morgan Freeman gives a lecture on philosophy with outdated bad pop-science, and Scarlett calls her mom sounding more stoned than that guy who thought his cream puff WAS the universe. If you liked this film, it's only because you've seen on DMT what Luc Besson saw when he got the idea for this film.

Thoughts? Did you love this, hate it, or mixed feelings?

I actually loved it so much I went to see it again twice in a row. Then again, I saw Cloud Atlas and Avatar each six times. I guess I just see something in pretentious films that other people don't? ;-)

[Trekker4747]

Mixed, landing on didn't like it.

ScarJo is about the only reason to go see it,

I was the opposite the movie had me largely for the most part, it fell off the rails around the airplane lavatory scene.

[Johnny Unusual]

Anyway, it is a very silly movie (how dated is the cosmic jump drive going to be in 5-10 years?), but the thing about Luc Besson is that as ridiculous as his movies are, they always remember to be fun, which usually something other big dumb action movies completely forget about.  And I actually like the use of editing in the movie, which 1. reminds me of how a lot of comic books use visual language and 2. is something I found interesting.  I agree that the latter half is the better half, as I would have liked to see her powers play out in more subtle ways.  I'd say it was worth the ticket price for some disposable but engaging popcorn entertainment, something Luc Besson seems to be skilled at (though I have not seen the much more negatively reviewed The Family).

One other thing I liked was getting to see Choi Min-sik in an English movie.  Though he doesn't speak English, he still manages to be magnetic in this one.

I see it as more stylized than pretentious.  I don't think Besson is actually trying to trick the audience into thinking that there is a greater meaning but is rather trying to give us a sense of cosmic scale.

[The Lurker]

Sounds like they could have used a translator for the film.

[RoninFox]

Obviously they're keeping her in an emptied room from a farmers market.

[Johnny Unusual]

Where they store Chinese bootlegged fruits.

[goflyblind]

Sounds like they could have used a translator for the film.

they hired ten percent of a translator.