Lucy

Invoking the innocence of our ancestors, this film offers an indictment of human folly

Lucy presently lives in Ethiopia—at least her skeletal remains do—and she is estimated to be about 3.2 million years old. Her Caucasian descendant, also called Lucy (Scarlett Johansson), is a 25-year-old American who lives in Taipei, Taiwan.

Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman), an African-American descendant of Lucy, is a neuroscientist in Paris. In a riveting presentation, he says that the brain utilises only 10 per cent of its potential, and should that proportion increase to about 20 per cent, we would be a much more evolved species. The movie, Lucy, begins by cutting between this professor’s lecture and the simultaneous events that take place in Taipei when Lucy is kidnapped by a drug lord and turned into a courier of a synthetic drug called CPH4, which, apparently, can multiply the brain’s capacity to think and feel.

The French director Luc Besson, who has also written and edited this work, gives us a taut 89-minute film that triggers a thought process and expands our philosophical imagination. His science fiction makes us wonder at the complexity of the planet and the recklessness of the species that dominates it. He looks at human greed through Lucy and the drug lord, and contrasts the venality of this materialism with the simplicity and beauty of the laws of physics and mathematics.

Once Lucy absorbs the CPH4 that is stitched inside her stomach by the gangsters, she begins to think exponentially and gets a bird’s eye view of space, matter and gravity by using the dynamic that unites them all—time. Our only measurement of time, she says, is memory. She moves backwards to her infancy, remembering the taste of her mother’s milk. She then moves infinitely further back to her ancestor, Lucy, and touches her. Then she asks: “Life was given to us a billion years ago. What have we done with it?” Touché.

About The Author

Ajit Duara