LUCY (PREVIEW) http://8bitthisblog.8bitthis.com/
Scarlett Johansson as Lucy
Director Luc Besson
Writer Luc Besson
Cinematography Thierry Arbogast
Action, Science FictionThe early levels of Lucy’s transformation present plenty of kicks and even a touching moment or two: After making her badass break out from Jang and his thugs, she struts into the nearest sanatorium’s running room, shoots the…
LUCY (PREVIEW) http://8bitthisblog.8bitthis.com/
Scarlett Johansson as Lucy
Director Luc Besson
Writer Luc Besson
Cinematography Thierry Arbogast
Action, Science Fiction
The early levels of Lucy’s transformation present plenty of kicks and even a touching moment or two: After making her badass break out from Jang and his thugs, she struts into the nearest sanatorium’s running room, shoots the sufferer on the desk — a look at the X-rays told her the patient’s brain tumor was once inoperable — and has a doctor pull out the rest medicines planted inside her. Forgoing anesthesia, she borrows the surgeon’s phone and calls her mother even as he cuts her open, describing what is going on in her head. “Mother, i will be able to feel everything,” she says as the camera close to imperceptibly rocks; sensations and feelings stretching again to her delivery are to be had to her, triggering what proves to be virtually the last human-like response she has in the movie.
Assume a stranger-in-a-strange-land revenge thriller about a huge-eyed Anglo bombshell (Scarlett Johansson) who will get kidnapped and abused in Taiwan via nasty, sweaty, shouting Korean gangsters after which escapes to search justice. Then imagine this equal movie starring, say, a lightning quick kick boxer who can knock a dozen opponents’ enamel out before they are able to raise a single fist. Now think this same film injected with a dose of apocalyptic science fiction, with the lady gaining strange powers as the story unfolds. Then envision middle of the night-movie touches blended into the filmmaking: flash cuts of predators and prey enhancing in any other case traditional scenes of plans being hatched; monologues about mind potential and the true meaning of time coupled with psychedelic visions and wormholes and explanatory objects materializing from thin air. http://8bitthisblog.8bitthis.com/
That is Luc Besson’s “Lucy,” a thriller about an American woman who will get kidnapped into provider as a drug mule bearing an experimental synthetic hormone, by chance absorbs some of it, and then sheds her bodily, intellectual and perceptual obstacles. I would describe 5 – 6 other types of films that someway also echo “Lucy.” Sections may just remind you of the long-established “The Matrix” and the last hour of “Akira,” and the ultimate ten minutes play like greatest Hits of science-fiction “commute” movies. You’ve gotten visible a lot of the man or woman circumstances and filmmaking methods in “Lucy” as good. In fact, you’d be rough pressed to identify one notion, scene or element in the image that’s not a cliché.
However the total package deal feels fresh. From the minute that Johansson’s title personality suffers a beating in captivity that ruptures the drugs in her belly and releases them into her bloodstream (a Yankee nightmare), the film enters a realm of continuous delight, although now not perpetually shock. There isn’t a factor naming any of the opposite primary characters, as there really are not any other characters, only varieties: the conceited fats-cat drug seller (Choi Min-Sik) who thinks he can control the brief blond drug mule and learns the rough means that he can’t; the extraordinary, deep-voiced scientist (Morgan Freeman, who else?) whose theoretical stories of the human brain’s untapped capabilities make him an expertise supply after which subsequently a kind of companion-savior to Lucy; the good-looking exceptional-guy Parisian cop (Amr Waked) who assists Lucy throughout her climactic mission to accumulate more of the experimental hormone to ingest and turn out to be something it is that she’s fitting: a 1950s sci-fi monster, normally—the kind that cannot be killed since the whole thing you shoot at it makes it greater and hungrier.
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Lucy is little greater than a kind herself—a consultant of humanity in its un-mutated, non-super state. Johannson’s mid-profession transformation from husky-voiced ingenue to intensely physical matinee idol is one of the extra exciting arcs in American cinema. It’s handiest her manipulate over her physique, voice and eyes—and probably our recognition that her performances in this movie, “Her” and “underneath the skin” are all of a piece; Lucy even makes use of the phrase “under the dermis” at one point!—that stops “Lucy” from being tiresome. Her work maintains us from realizing that Besson’s script has botched the hazard to inform a deeper story, one that is now not simply bombastically unique and superficially intelligent, but quietly tragic.
“Lucy” starts with photographs of the prehistoric ape-woman Lucy and periodically returns to her in the course of the story, no longer-too-subtly evaluating the heroine’s transformation to that of the species itself (“from evolution to revolution,” to quote one of the script’s extra pungent phrases). And yet there are best two moments that make us rather fully grasp and empathize with Lucy as whatever rather than a cipher that represents the un-evolved human. One is an early scene of her being terrorized and abused by using Taiwanese drug thugs: Lucy’s abject helplessness here is rough to watch. The other happens deeper within the story when Lucy realizes she’s about to embark on a terrifying and generally one-means transformative journey and phones her mom. The scene is shot normally in tight close up. The dialogue has a goofy Prussian boldness: “I recall the style of your milk in my mouth … I need to thank you for a thousand kisses that i will be able to believe on my face.”
That scene is so brazenly powerful that on reflection it made me want the essential persona had gone on a journey with extra emotional gradations. Heck, i might have settled for greater than the two that Besson deigns to provide us: “Oh, my God, these guys wish to kill me” and “I’m God, watch me kill these guys.” When the hormones enter Lucy’s bloodstream it can be as if a switch has been flipped. The heroine begins speak me in monotone and tilting her head at looming guys like a quizzical chook involving a worm that it is about to devour. She’s woman-as-Terminator. The Terminator is a nice film monster; however there may be a intent why it can be a helping character in the movies that bear its title.
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Like many movies with the aid of Besson—”The reliable,” “The Fifth detail,” “The Messenger” and other excessive-octane shoot-’em-ups—”Lucy” begins out riveting however becomes much less engaging because it goes along. It keeps introducing probably rich narrative veins after which failing to faucet them. It too ordinarily falls back on gunplay and gore just whilst you feel it might sooner or later delve into the notions that it maintains serving up with such fanfare (the falseness of the inspiration of forte; the self-defeating nature of a species “more worried with having than being”; time as “the one authentic unit of measure”).
Nonetheless: “Lucy” is a enjoyable, positive work. It is rapid and tight and playful even when it can be sadistic and violent, which is most often. It lasts about ninety minutes and change however feels longer in an effective way, since each 2nd is packed tight. It can be filled with itself, but it still keeps winking at you. It wishes to be taken critically, however no longer so significantly that you don’t snicker at (and with) the sight of Lucy jogging into a gunfight sporting nosebleed heels, or making enemies writhe like marionettes on invisible strings. The movie is alive. It pops.
A lot of films and novels have expected what would occur if we gained mindful manipulate over our complete mind. While most would most of the time makes a real neuroscientist cackle uncontrollably, it is hard to recall one whose strategies have been more laughable than this one. We may just roll with the movie as its heroine learns Taiwanese over the course of a cab experience or sees the electromagnetic spectrum of mobile phone calls, swiping via them as if she has been reading their conversations on a touch screen. We will even purchase it when she’s capable to change her physique at will — sure, developing a webbed hand would make an effort and fuel, but at the least a physique’s cells are managed by way of its brain. However the movie gives now not the slightest justification for Lucy’s increasingly godlike skills, which quickly comprise time travel and levitation. Every so often, a nugget of real philosophy is dropped into the screenplay, but it’s surrounded via lot blather that even a generous viewer has trouble using it to justify what Lucy experiences.
A French director tilting at an international audience, Besson himself as a rule seems to be caught between exceptional cultures and movie-making patterns. That confusion is mirrored in Lucy but is part of the movie’s richness. From his thriller Nikita (1990) early in his profession to the girl (2011), his biopic of Burmese political chief Aung San Suu Kyi, Besson has typically made movies about strong and defiant female characters. Lucy could also be careworn and eccentric but it’s elegant, provocative movie-making. As a motion film with strategies, additionally it is a welcome antidote to the mindless, testosterone-driven fare – such as the Expendables – that has been clogging up screens this summer time.
Lucy won’t make sense but it’s fresh to look Besson working at full throttle. The movie has an vigor and visible inventiveness that used to be just about absolutely lacking in his last function as a director, The loved ones, a lazy comedy-thriller in which an ageing mob boss (performed through Robert De Niro) hides out in provincial France.
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