From La Femme Nikita and The Professional to The Fifth Element, writer/director Luc Besson has created some of the toughest, most memorable female action heroes in cinematic history. Now, Besson directs Scarlett Johansson in Lucy, an action-thriller that tracks a woman accidentally caught in a dark deal who turns the tables on her captors and transforms into a merciless warrior evolved beyond human logic.
For people who think over the director's attempt to produce a movie, are going to appreciate Luc Besson's effort. Let's get started.
Movie started with a girl named Lucy, character performed by Scarlett Johansson. No background was provided about the character in the movie , so I guess director was pointing to the fact that she was just a normal girl with no interesting background and normal IQ.
The movie rolled when Lucy entered a drug dealing due to his friend Richard. It was supposed to be a simple job. All Lucy had to do was deliver a mysterious briefcase to Mr. Jang. But immediately Lucy is caught up in a nightmarish deal where she is captured and turned into a drug mule for a new and powerful synthetic drug. The Drug Mafia planted the drug, named as CPH-4, inside her intestine in the plastic packet, so as to deliver the drug to the destination. In parallel, Professor Norman, the leading authority on the human mind, was giving a speech about what are the possibilities in this context. Morgan Freeman played the character well.
The real movie started when accidentally the packet got torn apart and the drug entered her blood stream. The cinematography and actress's role during the transformation from a normal girl to a highly functional human being, was marvellous.
From a normal girl surrounded by fear to a highly functional human being, the transformation by Scarlett was amazing. Now I can understand why she was able to capture the role of Natasha Romanoff in Avengers.
With her increased brain capacity, she managed to escape from the local goons, killing them ruthlessly. The scenes like she watching the information or life energy flowing down the trees branches and her friend, are without any dialogues but they are thought provoking.
With enhanced brain functioning, her feeling for pain vanishes. Lying on operation table, talking to her mother while doctor are operating on her without anaesthesia, are worthed. Lucy's dialogues like "I remember everything, I can recall the sound of my bones growing beneath the skin in the womb" indicated the access to the information stored unconsciously in the remote areas of the brain. She starts joining the dots of previously acquired knowledge.
Professor Norman guides her to seek the real aim of life, real aim of existence, which went a little philosophical, after being contacted by her showing her powers of controlling EM waves. She then goes back to Jang, the drug dealer to get more of it. The dialogues by Lucy, I must say worth an applaud, "..pain is an obstacle..."
In the process she contacts French police captain Pierre Del Rio, who helps her till the end. With increasing brain functioning which was shown in percentage, she was able to see phone network signals and control other humans.
The plane scene where she was using two laptops simultaneously, her fingers start falling apart and floating around the plane like sand in hurricane. On getting the dose of the drug again, she manages to restore her deterioration. This scene was supported by Norman's quote that "body cell begin to deteriorate in unfavourable conditions". Meanwhile the other drugs mules are apprehended. She wakes up in hospital with immaculate make-up and hair and goes to find the other mules who have had the drugs cut out of their guts and are now dead. In the process of acquiring the drug from police, Lucy makes everybody in the room faint using her powers to control other human beings. Then she goes to find one of the bad Chinese henchman who has the drugs – she turns him into a street mime and makes all the other bad guys float up to the ceiling.
In the laboratory, she then showed them unravelling the powers as her brain functionality approaches 100%. As the brain functionality meter goes up, she starts to control the matter and starts to upload her information in a hard disk and then with more, she manage to do a time travel unwrapping the secrets of human origin and origin of universe by travelling back to Big Bang. What you really see in those scenes are exaggerated version of Hubble Space Telescope photography created by Industrial Light & Magic, with references including X-Rays, underwater imagery and MRIs.
Much of the space imagery was actually derived visually from an interesting and different approach. If you start with some of the designs for the nebulas by taking animated fractal shapes (fractal shapes and mathematical sets that create repeating shapes at every scale) and driving particle simulations through those shapes to create abstract nebulous creations that had a hint of “intelligence” to them. The major 3D fractal particle sequences were ultimately omitted from the film.
In the mean time, Jang manages to come to the lab to kill her. The end was marvellous when Jang tries to shoot her and she just vanishes as the meter touches 100% and when the French policeman asks ,"where is she" and his phone beeps with the message "I am everywhere".
Explanations:
Throughout the progression of her transformation, wherein Lucy steadily gets access to further remote areas of her brain, she is shown to acquire several powers. She travels through the space/time continuum, travelling back through time to reach the ape Lucy. Also, when there is a glimpse of planets, galaxies and universes, It is intended to imply that she gains knowledge of formation of galaxies as well. But at the very end, what exactly does she become?
After all this ends, and especially in light of the text Lucy sends- I am everywhere, would you say that Lucy has become God, or something beyond God, or something else entirely?
The ending kind of seems puzzled. What happens at 100% brain usage can’t anyway be fathomed by us mere 10% souls. 100% goes beyond dimensions and into the meta-physical. Let me try and explain the ending or what I could make of it.
1. Disappearance of Lucy
Lucy already was able to control her body and also matter by that time. Since body is also made of matter, disappearing/disintegrating sounds not that difficult. As she explained earlier maybe she went faster than speed of light which opens all dimensions but invisible to us. As to what happened to her post that is what we will explore ahead.
2. Why make the Super-Computer if all that was left was a pen-drive?
Seems silly on the face of it. Seems like director tried to simplify for the audience and hence the pen drive. Or maybe Lucy thought for current world pen-drive would seem easy to grasp.
What happened was Lucy started merging matter around her as she needed energy. Energy equals mass time speed of light squared. A lot of energy to upload all knowledge she could gather from the starting of time.
Energy was needed not just to create the processing unit for that knowledge but also to convert it into a format understood by normal humans. The pen-drive seems simplistic but it could not have been a simple pen drive. It would need to store huge amount of data maybe TB powers 100 for all we know. All knowledge gathered as she moved through time.
That computer was just for processing data to be able to store into pen drive. Hence computer destroyed itself at the end.
3. If she is so super human and could control time. Why did she die?
Here’s the catch. She did not die. She imbibed herself to all dimensions. She had no need for the body. She can’t feel pain. No happiness. More like a robot. Hence she gave up last piece of vulnerability. Her body. She became omnipresent. Across dimensions, across time, across worlds.
4. Everything she gained was due to her brain. How would she survive now without her brain?
Tricky! She would have what was required. This was answered by the last scene where it was shown that the cells merged with nucleus, the store house of information. The meta-physical, omnipresent form. Can be equated to our understanding of God. Invisible to us.
I would rather point out towards the term we know as Enlightenment or Illumination, which means "awakening" and "understanding". Someone who is awakened has gained insight into the workings of the mind which keeps us imprisoned in craving, suffering and rebirth, and has also gained insight into the way that leads to nirvana, the liberation of oneself from this imprisonment of life.
This phenomena has been shown in other movies as well. We know this process by the name of Ascension.
In mythologies we describe this as entering the heaven alive.
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