Lucy

This is Lucy, a female Australopithecus who lived around 3.2 million years ago. Lucy has a brief CGI cameo in Luc Besson's new film of the same name, in which the titular character is played by an extremely distant relative of hers named Scarlet Johansson.

There is a certain tight kind of unity a film can have when it's directed by the person who wrote it. The intention of the language and the intention of the direction marry with each other to illuminate the film's subject matter in pleasing and surprising ways. Luc Besson, who directed Lucy, also edited it. His direction and his editing go together beautifully and carry the story of the film, which is fortunate because he also wrote the script and man, that guy cannot write for shit. Oh, the clunky dialogue and tiresome, interminable, faux-philosophical, pseudoscientific exposition. Oh. My. Goodness.

The first forty-five minutes or so of Lucy take place in Taipei. Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, an American expat who gets tangled up in a drug-smuggling operation run by brutal gangsters. During this portion of the film, many of the characters speak Mandarin to one another, and as Lucy does not understand what they are saying, and we see the movie from her point of view, there are no subtitles. The visual storytelling of the movie, the physical performances, and the wonderful editing come together so well that it's always clear what's going on.

A short while later, Morgan Freeman lays out the central idea of the movie in pretty much the worst TED talk you've ever heard. Remember that debunked theory that some people had in the 1990's that we only use a small percentage of our brains and if we could only manage to use the whole thing we'd be capable of amazing feats of intelligence? In this movie that theory is true and is described by Morgan Freeman in a speech so excruciatingly poorly written that by the end, hell, by the middle, you wish he was giving it in a language that you didn't understand.

The speech is accompanied by a Powerpoint presentation that includes video of Rhinoceroses having sex.

Anyway, at first Scarlett Johansson is helpless, in the wrong place at the wrong time, buffeted wildly by threatening forces beyond her control, and then a packet of drugs that has been sewn into her abdomen leaks into her bloodstream and instead of killing her, the drug makes her more and more awesome and badass. Her awesomeness and badassitude are helpfully charted by a series of intertitles consisting only of a number followed by a percent sign, and the higher the number is, the more of an awesome badass she becomes. When she can't possibly become any more of an awesome, awesome badass, the movie ends because it has nothing left to do.

So should you go see this movie? I think so. It was really fun. The words were stupid, but the pictures were pretty and the performances were engaging. Scarlet Johansson is entertaining as an enigmatic superbeing. Although Morgan Freeman has nothing to do but utter exposition when the movie needs us to hear it, he is as usual a deep-voiced bundle of gravitas. There are nice shots of cells dividing and cheetahs hunting, and many international cities are shown to us via attractive cinematography. Plus there's a funny cop. So if you do go, eat some popcorn or Junior Mints, look attentively but don't bother to listen hard, and you'll probably have a great time.