LUCY - Grading & Discussion

My problem with Limitless isn't the big bad decision. It's that up to that point he hadn't done anything with his superintelligence that he couldn't have done by just getting up off his ass and applying himself.

 

I don't know anything about Buddhism but watching the movie reminded me of Noah and I was thinking of the concept of the Alpha and the Omega as Lucy was everywhere as she went back to the beginning of time.

 

^ According to Buddhism, the development of the mind goes through several stages...

1. Your mind starts to focus and becomes more stable.

2. As your mind becomes more stable, you become more aware of your feelings and physical sensations. This is the point where you have access to your memories and imagination.

3. As mental stability progresses, you become an impartial observer of your thoughts and experiences. This is where you can view yourself and the world objectively.

4. With stable objectivity, you can see past your thoughts and experiences (your "self") and into how things work and fit together. This is supposed to be the stage where the nature of space (and time) can be seen for what it is. Same with consciousness and distinction. With distinction gone, you experience everything as a cohesive whole, 'the alpha and the omega', so to speak.

Lucy's journey was consistent with these stages and it looks like Besson threw in a bit of time travel as part of that last stage.

 

Looks like Admiral2 was onto something when he said that there was a bit of 2001 in there. Luc Besson had this to say...

Link

 

It certainly had a lot of inspirations, but ended up being a mess ultimately.

Basically, we have all seen the story before in Star Trek's "Where man has gone before" where it was much better done.


The action scenes where good, seeing Johansson is a pleasure to watch in anything and the bad guy was doing the best he could with what he was given.

Personally, i have several alternate endings in my mind for this movie that make it a lot better.

For example, instead of making the cosmological USB dongle, Lucy dumps a black monolith on the moon...

Or, right before the final scene we cut back to that cell at the beginning where Lucy dies of the mother of all epileptic seizures with the whole movie being a gigantic drug induced trip, cause that's what 100% brain activity is: a big honkin' seizure.
And then a cut to Morgan Freeman totally debunking the 10% myth revealing the story as 90 minutes of trolling of pseudoscience freaks.

 

What bugs me is... in the past three weeks, we've had three #1 big-hit moneymaker movies -- Lucy, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Ninja Turtles -- and only one of them, GotG, is actually a good movie (although really lacking in the villain department). It no longer seems to matter whether a movie is any good -- people will see it anyway. Or at least, the target audience of adolescent males, the only demographic these big blockbusters seem to be catering to anymore, will see it anyway.

And The Outer Limits' "The Sixth Finger" a couple of years before that. And quite a few other works of film, TV, comics, literature, etc.

Good one! I remember reading/seeing that pointed out somewhere, that actual 100% brain activity would be an extreme seizure. It would pretty much be neurological white noise.

 

F.

I can not remember the last time I had this little fun watching a movie.

Rotten Tomatoes consensus says "Enthusiastic and silly, Lucy powers through the movie's logic gaps with cheesy thrills plus Scarlett Johansson's charm -- and mostly succeeds at it." and the movies is certified Fresh with a 65%.

The user rating is an abysmal 48%... but I figured that as per the critic consensus, a fast pace and Johansson would carry the picture.

Nope.

I did not find the movie fast paced at all, I was outright bored and couldn't wait for the thing to end. Likewise I did not find Johansson the least bit charming, which blows my mind because she's been great in everything else I have seen her in.

A real disappointment of a movie.

 

Scarjo did a movie recently called 'Under the skin' that's movie was pretty bad where she acted quiet and stoic like in this film. Lucy was ok, but definitely could have been better.

 

^ That movie was awful. You know a movie has to be bad when naked ScarJo can't salvage it.

At 48% Rotten Tomatoes acquired mind control and brainwashed the critics.

At 65% Rotten Tomatoes blew my mind that such a shitty movie could be rated this high.

Can you imagine what Rotten Tomatoes will do when it reaches 100%?

 

In 'Under The Skin' was that even her that was naked in the beginning? I suspect with the dark lighting it was a body double. I was hoping to see more of naked Scarjo as the film went on, instead you just got a bunch of naked dudes (her victims) instead.