Lucy

TAKE 1: One Man’s Opinion

…because film is largely subjective

 by Frederick William Springer III

Lucy

Release Date:  25 July 2014                                                                    Runtime:  89 Minutes              

Review Date:  14 October 2014                                                              Rating:  3.5 (of 6)

     "Life was given to you a billion years ago.  Now you know what to do with it."*  Um, stop seeing Luc Besson movies?

      While I always enjoy watching Morgan Freeman perform, his role is limited and not worth watching Lucy for.  Scarlet Johansson, while she can act, usually does nothing for me on screen (though, interestingly, I did enjoy her voice as the operating system in Her).  As she is the title character here, that's problematic.

 

 

     The story is a little different, though I wouldn't call it all-out weird, which was enough to hook me into giving it a try but not enough to keep me interested.  Luckily, the pacing and editing were good, so while my interest did wane, there was never a lull for me to actually get bored.

     Luc Besson fans are going to see Lucy regardless of what I think, but the rest of you can skip this one.

 

     *Oh, by the way, primates can only be traced back 65 MILLION years, not a BILLION.  Single-celled organisms can be traced back 3.8 Billion, but life forms we're more familiar with only began to appear 570 million years ago.  Again, not a BILLION.  So, if you're trying to build off science fact for your film, which all things suggest, than maybe you should take 10 minutes and actually get the facts straight!

      (On a related side note, a neat graphic of life on earth can be viewed here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Geological_time_spiral.png)