LUCY
I watch bad movies. Sometimes, I watch bad movies to enjoy the experience of riffing on them, and sometimes I do it to help me appreciate decent movies. In other words, yeah, the Signal didn't change my life, but it had some interesting ideas and entertained me for a couple of hours.
Then there are movies like Lucy. I watch bad movies, but I like to know I'm watching a bad movie. Much like biting into a cream puff, only to discover that it was actually a cheese ball, sitting down to watch Lucy was an unpleasant surprise.
It isn't like I wasn't warned about this. And I like to allow science fiction and fantasy movies some pixie dust to get things moving. If Morpheus says "The body cannot live without the mind," or Thor says "What you call science and magic are, to my people, the same," I don't stomp my feet and leave the theater. Generally these movies have enough sense to wave their hands and then step away, letting the story unfold.
Lucy starts with bunkum science, adds bunkum biotech, and then adds bunkum philosophy. This is the kind of wisdom that you get from a high-as-balls undergraduate at 3am who has solved the universe. This is Deepak Chopra's version of the Matrix.
Some of the effects were pretty cool, and some of them looked distinctly like a generic smartphone ad, without the courtesy of someone trying to sell you a smartphone. Pens levitate, divide, turn into ferrofluids, and we listen to a very bored wooden evolved Scarlett Johansen tell us things like "there are no numbers" and "every cell in my body exchanges thousands of bits a second" to a room full of slack-jawed scientists and Miss Daisy's chauffeur. Don't get me wrong, I like Morgan Freeman, and he does his best "wise and humble" bit here, but he isn't saving this dog. Not even the humping Rhinos could do that.
Did I mention that there were humping Rhinos? Because there were. And warthogs. And Lions. I think there might have been humping cattle. These "Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom" moments are randomly interspersed with Freeman's pontificating on how cells try to pass on information through either immortality or reproduction, blah blah, insert pictures of tornadoes and volcanoes. Insert movies of early 20th century magicians for some damn reason.
Oh yeah- I forgot, professor Easy Reader has managed to figure out that if we could use 20% of our brains, that we could control our own bodies and repair tissue at will, if we could use 40%, we could control other bodies, and I think become whales, my whole memory of this woo woo gets a little fuzzy on that point.
But this movie isn't yet done with the sucking. At one point, apparently the director just gave up trying to make sense and sucked the slack-jawed geniuses into an Apple commercial. Not that they were selling Apple computers, but that they got sucked into some environment with an all-white background, and were standing on nothing. You know, because brain.
Did I mention computers? Because those were terrible here as well. A perfectly normal laptop that spins up hundreds of windows in the course of a few seconds, none of which seemed to be viagra ads or that "personal trainers HATE him" guy, and then later our heroine stops needing computers because she can "control radio waves" and just project herself, streaming, onto your cell phone. I got teased for liking electric dreams because of its "home automation nightmare" scene, but anything silly about that movie gets strictly outclassed in dumbness here.
I think I'm going to stop here, but there's more- ask me about the tortured explanation of human origins, or the horrible homage to 2001, or the godawful random posse of Native Americans on horseback, or the cosmic thumbdrive, or for heaven's sake, the ACTUAL CRIME THAT IS SUPPOSED TO DRIVE THIS TURD...
Or just save yourself the trouble and watch a better movie. :)
Then there are movies like Lucy. I watch bad movies, but I like to know I'm watching a bad movie. Much like biting into a cream puff, only to discover that it was actually a cheese ball, sitting down to watch Lucy was an unpleasant surprise.
It isn't like I wasn't warned about this. And I like to allow science fiction and fantasy movies some pixie dust to get things moving. If Morpheus says "The body cannot live without the mind," or Thor says "What you call science and magic are, to my people, the same," I don't stomp my feet and leave the theater. Generally these movies have enough sense to wave their hands and then step away, letting the story unfold.
Lucy starts with bunkum science, adds bunkum biotech, and then adds bunkum philosophy. This is the kind of wisdom that you get from a high-as-balls undergraduate at 3am who has solved the universe. This is Deepak Chopra's version of the Matrix.
Some of the effects were pretty cool, and some of them looked distinctly like a generic smartphone ad, without the courtesy of someone trying to sell you a smartphone. Pens levitate, divide, turn into ferrofluids, and we listen to a very bored wooden evolved Scarlett Johansen tell us things like "there are no numbers" and "every cell in my body exchanges thousands of bits a second" to a room full of slack-jawed scientists and Miss Daisy's chauffeur. Don't get me wrong, I like Morgan Freeman, and he does his best "wise and humble" bit here, but he isn't saving this dog. Not even the humping Rhinos could do that.
Did I mention that there were humping Rhinos? Because there were. And warthogs. And Lions. I think there might have been humping cattle. These "Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom" moments are randomly interspersed with Freeman's pontificating on how cells try to pass on information through either immortality or reproduction, blah blah, insert pictures of tornadoes and volcanoes. Insert movies of early 20th century magicians for some damn reason.
Oh yeah- I forgot, professor Easy Reader has managed to figure out that if we could use 20% of our brains, that we could control our own bodies and repair tissue at will, if we could use 40%, we could control other bodies, and I think become whales, my whole memory of this woo woo gets a little fuzzy on that point.
But this movie isn't yet done with the sucking. At one point, apparently the director just gave up trying to make sense and sucked the slack-jawed geniuses into an Apple commercial. Not that they were selling Apple computers, but that they got sucked into some environment with an all-white background, and were standing on nothing. You know, because brain.
Did I mention computers? Because those were terrible here as well. A perfectly normal laptop that spins up hundreds of windows in the course of a few seconds, none of which seemed to be viagra ads or that "personal trainers HATE him" guy, and then later our heroine stops needing computers because she can "control radio waves" and just project herself, streaming, onto your cell phone. I got teased for liking electric dreams because of its "home automation nightmare" scene, but anything silly about that movie gets strictly outclassed in dumbness here.
I think I'm going to stop here, but there's more- ask me about the tortured explanation of human origins, or the horrible homage to 2001, or the godawful random posse of Native Americans on horseback, or the cosmic thumbdrive, or for heaven's sake, the ACTUAL CRIME THAT IS SUPPOSED TO DRIVE THIS TURD...
Or just save yourself the trouble and watch a better movie. :)