A breakthrough film others will follow
I don’t get (know what I mean) the critics, of which more than a few have panned “Lucy,” a 2014-released science fiction thriller by director Frenchy Luc Besson.
Yeah, movies get panned for being bad, but this is the one that got their goat. Instead of getting what they expected, the critics got a movie that overturned conventions to become something they didn’t expect and couldn’t describe, so their first reaction was to call it stupid and silly.
But this is the one that other movies will now take from and follow. It has set something of a new standard in the sci-fi subgenre of epic exegetic journey – action thriller really has nothing to do with it. And this film unquestionably launches its star, Scarlett Johansson, into the heady spheres of superstardom for many years to come.
Critics attack the film’s intelligence by smugly pointing to yawning gaps in its logic, without suggesting which logic, exactly, would satisfy their brainy needs. It’s not like this movie is entertainment, or anything as low as that – no. As if another director will now come up with the more logical version of the same story – one that would match the critics’ high intellect, as well as their honor and dignity.
Because if another moviemaker does come up with the more intellectually sound version of “Lucy,” that film will lose big time – lose, because once something like “Lucy” is done, no one can do anything like it again, except remotely.
From here on in, only images and ideas can be taken from “Lucy’s” bountiful font and developed for new films, but, like Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” no one will ever be able to do “Lucy” better.
Like other films not immediately accepted by viewers because of their jolting and disturbing newness, this film will grow on the collective memory in recall, with its images returning to the mind again and again until in time it becomes a cult classic enjoying a completely new status as a significant achievement in cinema history.
This is one of those films that will require some time before it begins to sink in. It is part of the film’s brilliance that it looks like a film of instant gratification, or one that is supposed to be that, but through that guise turns out to be exactly the opposite. And this is what bugs people.
Besson has taken old formulas, used over and over again from film to film, and suddenly blown them apart. Naturally, receiving this shock, the public, expecting modes and idioms it has grown used to, is simply not ready to embrace such a film and at first refuses to appreciate all the potential latent in the film’s frames.
With “Lucy,” it will take some time. And then it will happen. How much time is a question I’m not quite prepared to answer; but with everything moving so much faster today than they did in Kubrick’s 1968, I suspect we’ll be seeing obvious theft from, and nods to, “Lucy” within the next year or two, with the stealing becoming so rampant that much of what Besson gave us in “Lucy” will become accepted, and expected, convention.
But it will always remain clear that “Lucy” had been the one to set the new bar. In using “Lucy,” it’s highly likely filmmakers will almost inadvertently create a few new genres in the process.
What Frenchy did – he’s not some Kubrick genius; he just got lucky; but sometimes, that’s all it takes.
There are science fiction movies that are contrived – like the newest additions to the Planet of the Apes franchise – the 2011 “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” and the 2014 “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” to which Manny Face says: “Yeah, right.” Movies such as these run on a logic that is too overtly fake to allow us a credible suspension of disbelief.
Then there are the sci-fi flicks that power forward according to a far more convincing and inexorable logic, like Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” his beautiful “Blade Runner;” the first three “Terminators,” and the “Matrix” series.
Lastly, there are the movies that dare to almost exclusively ponder the great metaphysical and existential questions of being, life, knowing, memory, mind, the corporeality or incorporeality of the body, identity, the soul, space, and time. They do so at the expense of a strong, immediately graspable logic, except for one that is somewhat beyond us, requiring that we think for a long time about what we have just seen. And there is no neat summing up, no denouement, no real climax, and no real ending.
These movies construct framework stories filled with mysterious, epic content laden with allegory and metaphor that abound in interpretive potential, while the overall stories told remain mystifying and impenetrable, beyond our immediate ability to grasp as a whole.
In their varying degrees, the “Terminator” movies, “Blade Runner,” and “The Matrix,” with which “Lucy” has been compared, fit this bill.
But the true, and purest exemplars of this sub-genre are, first and foremost, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the for-the-most-part grating “Tree of Life,” and now “Lucy.”
“Lucy” has been compared to “Limitless,” but, except for the permanently mind-altering drug-taking, “Limitless” is too local and “limited” in its breadth, depth, and scope to even remotely compare with “Lucy,” and it really shares no vision.
Of these, “Lucy’s” closest relative is indeed Kubrick’s “Space Odyssey.” Both give us a star being, or child, though each a somewhat different kind. Yet, the two seem to go together, forming a loop and becoming an eternal continuation of each other. “Lucy” moves much faster, and is much shorter, than the Kubrick film, but in that way is both “Space Odyssey’s” compliment and modern-day pop complement.
Meanwhile, what I mean by Besson overturning conventions is like his throwing an endlessly proliferating host of black-suited, heavily armed criminal mega-corp Koreans at the character Lucy, much as we may get in any number of Asian and wuxia martial arts fantasies (“House of Flying Daggers”), the legions of infinite Smiths in “The Matrix,” or John Woo’s “The Killer.”
And yet, it is clear that in “Lucy” Besson purposefully smudges their contours, increasingly blurring their purpose and mission, until their very existence becomes questionable and they dissolve against and within the power of Lucy’s experience and transformation. She is able to arrange time, place, and her own being according to her will. The Koreans no longer matter. They are not, and never were, the story. But this is what got the critics upset and why they’ve called the plot nonsensical and convoluted – they were looking for more commitment, and greater resolution, as to the Koreans.
In the movie, in a very Kantian vein Lucy says matter is only possible because of time.
She shows how matter speeded up disappears, leading us to question whether it is really there. Manny Face will allow that the 1960s TV series “Star Trek” did that once with a race of humanoids, who moved at speeds far exceeding our own, making them invisible.
Most significantly, Manny Face believes, in the movie, Lucy says, “There is no death,” and we know she knows. Because of what Besson has shown us, we believe.
At the end of the movie, now that she is “everywhere,” her invisible spirit tells us, “Life was given to us a billion years ago. Now you know what you can do with it.”
She is now among us.
I’ve said everything I wanted to say. Scarlett Johansson’s pretty hot, and Manny Face’d do with her everything you’d expect me to. There’d be no choice in the matter for li’l ol’ Miss Scarlett. But there are other things I need to do now; things that are a lot more important.
I didn’t give you many plot details. You don’t need them, my friends.
I think, I feel I must be signing off pretty soon.
Manny Face, September 21, 2014