The early trailer for Luc Besson’s new film, “Lucy,” promised giddy digital wizardry, and the movie delivers, in a way that surprised me. I saw that it would have a pulp-fiction setup (though I couldn’t foresee the gore). I knew that it would involve Scarlett Johansson displaying supernatural powers. I had no idea that it would borrow metaphysical themes, imagery, and even ideas from the films of Terrence Malick. Besson, who wrote the script and directed, makes use of a keen science-fiction setup that could be lifted from a scrappy and hectic nineteen-fifties drive-in classic. He reaches speculative heights that are fascinating to ponder, thrilling to watch onscreen, and silly to throw away on a rickety story with clumsily pumped-up excitement and emptied-out implications.
Johansson—happily and sassily back on Earth and out of her eerie-astral mode—plays the title role. She’s an American student in Taipei whose boyfriend ropes her into a scheme that lands her in the hands of crime lords. They turn her into an involuntary mule, with pouches of an exotic new drug sewn into her stomach. When the pouches rupture, the instant overdose doesn’t kill her; it sends her into a particular sort of overdrive.
That’s where the ingeniously faux science comes in. Morgan Freeman plays Dr. Samuel Norman, a neuroscientist with an audacious theory based on the commonplace fictional fact that human beings use only a small percentage of their brains. The professor speculates—based on the keen perceptual abilities of dolphins—that, were we able to tap into a higher percentage, the results wouldn’t merely be an increase in intellectual power but new forms of perception and agency that would seem, by our current standards, extrasensory.
The theory is put to the test when Lucy gets hyperdrugged. The substance increases her percentage of cerebral access, and she becomes what students dream of being: a memorious speed-reader, an instant language-learner, and a super-accelerated stereo-typist (with both hands blazing separately on the keyboards of two laptops). Then things get weird: Professor Norman’s theories turn out to be right, and Lucy is able to perceive such things, she says (and I quote Lucy loosely), as the stuff of her own metabolism, the blood in her veins, every memory (including those dredged up from infancy), the force of gravity, the spinning of the globe.
I confess: this notion, which Besson conjures solely through the power of the word, is a scenaristic stroke of cinema. It suffices for Lucy to claim such knowledge—and then, to speak by phone to her mother about some primal experiences from infancy—for it to seem real. It’s at such moments (and there aren’t many) that a vestige of Besson’s own primordial and perhaps unconscious cinematic heritage, the modern French cinema of talk, comes to the fore.
Besson also contrives clever visual correlates for Lucy’s heightened perceptions, showing, from her point of view, something like colorful strings of energy arising from people in the street, which, taken together, become curtains of energy that—though lining the city—she can summon to arm’s length and manipulate manually like a touch screen, prying apart with two fingers a string from which she can access streams of linguistic and symbolic data.
By then, Lucy’s amped-up physical and quasi-metaphysical powers have also kicked in. She finds that she can exert electromagnetic power from afar, and then, eventually, do even more. Lucy is also interested in chasing down the criminals who put her into this predicament, and she heads to Paris both to consult the professor and join forces with a French police officer to prevent a drug-mob massacre. To do this, of course, she harnesses these new powers. (Some neat effects involve action at a close distance—pinning assailants to the ceiling, emptying the cartridge of an attacker’s gun before he can shoot her, creating force fields that her pursuers slam up against.)
But Besson saves the best for the extremes of micro- and macro-experience. He looks to the molecular with visions of globules dividing and hysterical-impressionistic, multicolored riots of vascular and neural overexcitement. The grand-scale part comes when Lucy’s control of ambient energy taps into the mainframe of existence, the core of space and time. The trailer shows some wondrous stop-motion effects in Times Square and Lucy’s power to swipe action in and out, from high-speed to frozen and back, with her hand, as if swiping along a smartphone or tablet screen. Besson takes this idea audaciously, exhilaratingly far. I won’t spoil the contemplative delight, except to say that he comes amazingly close to territory covered in the more visionary moments of Malick’s “The Tree of Life.” Even now, I can hardly believe what I saw in “Lucy.”
Yet Malick’s movie—with its authentically profound considerations of the links between experience and transcendence, between ordinary life and intuitions of the absolute, between scientific knowledge and religious ecstasy—has an aesthetic, a style, a tone, a mood, which cohere with its grand ideas. His scenes of family drama in Texas, featuring such actors as Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, are filmed as distinctively and with as original and imaginative a vision as his synthetic images of the beyond, and the substance of that drama (down to the role of music in it, which meshes with the music heard on the soundtrack) is integral to his cinematic-philosophical creation.
Besson, by contrast, films the action with energy and flair but little originality. He realizes his characters with virtually no tendrils of identity to link up to his grander conceit. The emptily throbbing music, by Eric Serra, is placed on the soundtrack no differently from the way that similarly generic action music is employed in “Transformers,” “Edge of Tomorrow,” or other, lesser violent thrillers.
And, no, it isn’t the violence that’s a problem. It often seems that the cinema divides, like culture at large, into two worlds—one based on visions of peace and harmony, the other based on energy and violence—the cinema of “Boyhood” and the cinema of “Transformers,” for instance. (Of course, Malick himself, whose movies of exalted aesthetic confection are also rooted in a tragic vision of violence, proves that the dichotomy is artistically bankrupt.) It would be easy to deride Besson for seeming to co-opt the intellectual basis of Malick’s transcendent cinematic world in order to trick up a banal and conventional crime story with conventional sympathies and conventional cinematic pleasures of bloody mayhem.
But even that idea, in principle, could be a good one. Why not, according to the strange and subterranean circuits of history, conjure vast metaphysical consequences from the sort of seamy story that might make for a few lines in a newspaper’s crime blotter? That’s an idea as true to history as it is rooted in cinematic and artistic history. But Besson’s film doesn’t display the documentary sensibility, the practical curiosity, that this would entail. There’s no problem with the movie’s pulp-fiction essence; the problem is that almost all of Besson’s formidable imagination went into the science-fiction concept and the magnificent computer-graphic realization of it, and very little of that brain power went into the ordinary framework. It’s only through the exercise of observation and the application of invention that the ordinary becomes, in itself, extraordinary. Here, Besson merely adorns the implacable ordinary with elements of the extraordinary. It’s the difference between a movie that offers casual delight (as “Lucy” does) and one that goes into the wonder.
