"Lucy" Review
Luc Besson has brought us some awesome female heroines in cinema. Natalie Portman rocked in “The Professional, Bridget Fonda in “Point of No Return” (which produced La Femme Nikita), and I don’t remember Milla Jovovich before “The Fifth Element”. So I expected Scarlett Johansson to enter the pantheon as well. “Lucy” is a disappointment.
The premise is cool. The old “humans only use 10% of their brain” trope looks good in trailers but clunky in the feature length film. Scarlett Johannson is Lucy, a party girl who gets caught up in a drug deal and is forced to mule said drugs in her abdomen. After the bag leaks into her blood stream, she starts to unlock parts of her brain that the rest of us can’t.
Throughout the movie Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman) teaches us about the human brain. Most experts in films like this sound trustworthy, but the good professor makes absolutely no sense. It’s extremely difficult to follow what he is talking about as hard as you may try, and you feel like you just walked out of the room from taking an SAT after the film.
The issue is that Besson really doesn’t have a story past the premise. It’s hard to take the film seriously when he cuts back and forth between the animal kingdom, evolution, and Lucy’s brain development inching to 100%. Lucy goes from ditsy, annoying party girl to Rain Man. Her disconnected, monotoned, candor when on the drug is dull. As Lucy gets more advanced, she says things like “I remember the taste of your milk in my mouth” to her mother to show that she can remember everything from the time she was born. Seriously? No! How can you take “Lucy” seriously when she says things like that?
There are some staple Luc Besson action sequences that are cool to watch. I thought this film would be a vehicle for Johansson to be a new action star, especially with her work as Black Widow, but she barely fights in the film. Instead, she creates force fields, makes people sleep, or suspends them in the air. Basically, this film is a bag of potato chips that looks delicious on the outside but is full of hot air! Don’t waste your time.
Rating: D
"Oblivion" Review
They say there’s nothing new under the sun, and it’s true with this film. If you’ve seen “Moon”, “Independence Day”, “The Matrix” or “Wall-E” you’ve seen some theme from this film before. What you haven’t seen is the depth of this post-nuclear Earth and the technology that’s used in the film.
Jack (Tom Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) live and work together as a technician/watcher duo charged with the task of repairing drones on Earth. It’s been decades since aliens destroyed our moon, sending the planet into environmental chaos. After nuking and killing most of the aliens, all of Earth’s inhabitants now live on one of Saturn’s moons. Earth’s water has to be drained and transported to Saturn in order for our race to continue. The only issue is that Scavengers (the aliens known as Scavs) still inhabit the Earth. So the drones roam the Earth to kill any Scavs that may tamper with the drainage system.
If that sounded complex, don’t worry, Jack explains it all with visuals as he gets to work in the beginning. Day in and out they do the same routine, but Jack wants more. Even though his memory has been wiped clean as a security measure against Scavs, he still has these images of a woman and questions he can’t get out of his head. He finally gets what he’s been yearning for in the form of a ship crashing on Earth with a load of humans.
From there the film is a journey to discover why the woman of Jack’s dreams has landed. As questions are answered the film starts to take a nose dive from its suspenseful beginnings. All the sci-fi films you’ve seen before crash together for an ending that you probably saw coming.
Cruise is one of those actors that have been doing this for so long, it’s easy. Unfortunately, his character is on cruise control as Jack isn’t developed very well. Morgan Freeman gets an awesome entrance to the film as Beech, but (in Forrest Gump’s voice) “that’s all I have to say about that”.
There’s no question that director Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy) had a vision for this Earth, the environment, and it’s one that we’ve never seen before (for the most part). The synthesized score is reminiscent of Vangelis (Blade Runner) but it works for the movie. Overall the visuals and suspense of the beginning of the film make it worth your hard earned cash to see a recycled story that entertains.
Rating: C