The Case for Remaking Lucy
Feb. 16th, 2016 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wingedbeastLucy is the story of a young woman, suddenly forced into being a drug mule for an international mafia, who gets an overdose of a drug that expands her mind, making her get smarter immediately and become a super-powered nigh-deity. Based on the premise and the look of the drug, there's a good case to be made for Lucy being an unofficial sequel to Limitless, in which someone tests out a drug that makes them much smarter.
Both Lucy and Limitless have the same problem in their premise. The notion that you only use 10% of your brain is... I hesitate to be too mean about this, because in my youth I did buy into the notion for a long while. But, it shows a total lack of neurology knowledge. There is no such thing as a part of your brain that you do not use. That said, this might not be a problem for Lucy, depending on what the movie wants to be.
That is the first definite problem. Lucy doesn't know what it wants to be. Does it want to be a thoughtful consideration on a topic, like Ex Machina? Does it want to be an action movie with a semi-smart premise that allows for creative action, like The Matrix? Lucy doesn't know.
The next problem is that Lucy doesn't put the effort into either choice. A good movie could be both. An okay, but entertaining movie might suffer having either distract from each other. In Lucy, each failure distracts from the other failure.
In the story, Lucy starts out as an average-to-dumb college girl, being, to the best of my knowledge, your basic ugly American in Taiwan. There's next to no characterization of Lucy before the OD from the drug that gives her, over time, the use of more and more of her brain capacity. It's not absolutely the case that we would need that, but without that we have no context for any of her motivations, save to escape and/or avenge herself upon the organized crime syndicate that has so forced her into being a drug mule.
That lack of characterization may be just as well, because the transition from average ugly American in Taiwan to advanced-to-the-level-of-alien intelligence is instant. The emotion in Scarlett Johansson's performance immediately halts in favor of that of someone who is, as was described by Bennette the Sage in his review, "in the world, but not of it."
The lack of characterization also means that we don't know why she would contact Professor Norman, played by Morgan Freeman. We know that, after she starts becoming smarter, she reads his papers. But, we don't know why. It just seems assumed that reading obscure (to the general public) papers on neurology and physics is something that smart people will do.
Another problem comes in when she contacts Professor Norman and says that his papers are mostly right... as if to say that she knows more than him.
Let me be clear on something. She may, at this point, be smarter than him. She may be smart enough to read his papers in record time, comprehend them, enjoy them on an intellectual level, and even have attained enough information in order to challenge them for possible errors. There is no way that she has, on pure smartness, the information base to know that any of it is in error. Intellect doesn't work that way... well... except...
Except that his hypotheses are completely based on nothing. Part of the framing of the early part of the movie is Professor Norman giving a lecture on the amount of the brain that is used and the abilities that he predicts would be achieved at certain percentages. I could easily take all of this as just the sci-fi premise up until one point. Someone asks him a good question... but not the best question for the talk.
"How do you know all this?"
The answer is that... well... people didn't know that Copernicus was right until they did. Nothing about tests that verify people with abnormal mental abilities accessing parts of their brain normally unused by the average human. Nothing about any specific observation that would make a data set that hypothesis would fit. SCIENCE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!
In fact, many things about this movie do not work that way.
Science is a process that includes speculation in one step, but exists specifically to avoid just declaring things as accurate without foundation. That means that Professor Norman shouldn't be giving a talk like this in a University and shouldn't be a professor. At best, he should be "Professor" Norman and should be giving this talk online, because YouTube is not peer reviewed.
Being smarter due to a better functioning brain (or using more of it) doesn't mean having otherwise unknown information. "Smarter", in this sense, can possibly mean increased learning capacity, better recall of information, being able to consider more simultaneous factors and solve more complex problems with less comparative effort. Lucy, regardless of how smart she is, cannot be more knowledgeable than the human species as a whole. So, she can't tell a bunch of advance-degree scientists things they don't know (other than that psychic powers exist). At best, she should be able to provide interesting hypotheses and various means of testing.
Starting with the premise it did, I had very little interest in this movie. But, I saw it with my father and little brother because, hay, something to do with the family. The premise just told me that there was little intellectual effort going into this movie that would expect me to see it as very smart. That said, I do these Cases, in part, because just about any premise can work.
That said, I don't think we have to with the 10% myth just for the sake of keeping to the original idea. Depending on how serious the movie needs to be, we can shift that over to something just a bit less (speaking as someone who used to believe this) stupid. A drug that increases the speed of neurons can increase thought speed. A drug that encourages the formation of new neurons could do the same. Or we don't necessarily need to know the science fiction behind it.
That said, with corrections, there are two movies to be had and the two could easily be merged into one.
In either case, we do need more characterization. Intelligence does not produce its own motivation. It can change a character, but without motivations already there, there's no reason for intellect to spur movement all on its own. A character can be termed "unmotivated" while still having interests and things that would motivate, but for a lack of confidence or some basic information.
We need a character so that we have an idea of where they would go with this intellect, at least at first, that seems plausible enough to get us involved.
In the action movie, one important element is for not just Lucy, as the main character, to get characterization, but also one of the antagonists. It doesn't have to be as much as Lucy's. As soon as she's identified to have become so much smarter, so alien, due to an overdose of this drug, it's up to the organized crime syndicate to choose one of their own to subject to a similar experiment.
If there are two people reaching more and more of a nigh-infinite potential, we have a reasonable conflict with something on the line. The movie that we have has, more or less, an omnipotent deity up against an organized crime syndicate. They can be as impressive as you like, but the woman with massive telekinesis and the power to cause groups to go to sleep at once... no, it's just not tension.
So, for this action movie, she becomes super-smart and is super-obvious about it almost right away, to the extent of becoming a significant threat almost immediately. They respond in kind and the result is two people, each getting smarter and developing mental abilities, in a conflict. The intellect, in part, involves the ability to consider and manipulate more elements at a time, which enables all the action scenes to have what would make this an imaginative and fun action movie, Rube Goldberg devices.
Each participant, putting things into motion that will put things into motion that will put things into motion. With positioning and manipulation and advanced bluffing, the action can and tension can be a mixture of action chess, Rube-Goldberg devices, and conversation amidst it all. This can be fun, even funny, all while allowing the increasing intelligence of the characters to come through.
The intellectual movie, the one that explores ideas, that can still have an antagonist equal or not. The end of Lucy tried to be intellectual and smart with her discussion of science and time as what makes things exist. It was nothing more than putting some kind of gift to mankind as the thing that was on the line. That made it less than interesting to me as a story element.
Philosophically, it's an interesting thought... but as a story element, it's not being explored in the story, it's just used to show "look how smart she is to explain this to top PHDs in their fields."
If this story wants to explore something, there are options for it to explore. It could explore the difference between intellect and humanity, oft-explored already but worth a look. It could explore the feelings of alienation when one thinks in concepts that are just not in the lexicon of other people.
But, if we want to do what Lucy tried, have an intellectual movie with an action movie in one, one of the best things to explore is the long term consequences of our actions and our values.
One thing about values, at least as I understand the concept, is that, once you get to the core of your values, there's nothing to justify them. You can explain how you come to hold them in terms of upbringing and evolution. But, in terms of your philosophy, you hold those values because you hold those values. Nothing can justify them because any justification would rely upon more central values.
With that, we can have a movie that has moments of high energy merged with action chess, Rube Goldberg uses of geography landscape, and two characters that not only conflict, but debate. Each one has their values, each one is acting to achieve their values. The question is what, when it comes down to it, are their values?
Intellect may be how humans differentiate ourselves from the animals, but it's our animal selves that make us use that intellect.
Or, maybe I'm just rambling on without a clear thought... in which case, I already have remade Lucy.
Both Lucy and Limitless have the same problem in their premise. The notion that you only use 10% of your brain is... I hesitate to be too mean about this, because in my youth I did buy into the notion for a long while. But, it shows a total lack of neurology knowledge. There is no such thing as a part of your brain that you do not use. That said, this might not be a problem for Lucy, depending on what the movie wants to be.
That is the first definite problem. Lucy doesn't know what it wants to be. Does it want to be a thoughtful consideration on a topic, like Ex Machina? Does it want to be an action movie with a semi-smart premise that allows for creative action, like The Matrix? Lucy doesn't know.
The next problem is that Lucy doesn't put the effort into either choice. A good movie could be both. An okay, but entertaining movie might suffer having either distract from each other. In Lucy, each failure distracts from the other failure.
In the story, Lucy starts out as an average-to-dumb college girl, being, to the best of my knowledge, your basic ugly American in Taiwan. There's next to no characterization of Lucy before the OD from the drug that gives her, over time, the use of more and more of her brain capacity. It's not absolutely the case that we would need that, but without that we have no context for any of her motivations, save to escape and/or avenge herself upon the organized crime syndicate that has so forced her into being a drug mule.
That lack of characterization may be just as well, because the transition from average ugly American in Taiwan to advanced-to-the-level-of-alien intelligence is instant. The emotion in Scarlett Johansson's performance immediately halts in favor of that of someone who is, as was described by Bennette the Sage in his review, "in the world, but not of it."
The lack of characterization also means that we don't know why she would contact Professor Norman, played by Morgan Freeman. We know that, after she starts becoming smarter, she reads his papers. But, we don't know why. It just seems assumed that reading obscure (to the general public) papers on neurology and physics is something that smart people will do.
Another problem comes in when she contacts Professor Norman and says that his papers are mostly right... as if to say that she knows more than him.
Let me be clear on something. She may, at this point, be smarter than him. She may be smart enough to read his papers in record time, comprehend them, enjoy them on an intellectual level, and even have attained enough information in order to challenge them for possible errors. There is no way that she has, on pure smartness, the information base to know that any of it is in error. Intellect doesn't work that way... well... except...
Except that his hypotheses are completely based on nothing. Part of the framing of the early part of the movie is Professor Norman giving a lecture on the amount of the brain that is used and the abilities that he predicts would be achieved at certain percentages. I could easily take all of this as just the sci-fi premise up until one point. Someone asks him a good question... but not the best question for the talk.
"How do you know all this?"
The answer is that... well... people didn't know that Copernicus was right until they did. Nothing about tests that verify people with abnormal mental abilities accessing parts of their brain normally unused by the average human. Nothing about any specific observation that would make a data set that hypothesis would fit. SCIENCE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!
In fact, many things about this movie do not work that way.
Science is a process that includes speculation in one step, but exists specifically to avoid just declaring things as accurate without foundation. That means that Professor Norman shouldn't be giving a talk like this in a University and shouldn't be a professor. At best, he should be "Professor" Norman and should be giving this talk online, because YouTube is not peer reviewed.
Being smarter due to a better functioning brain (or using more of it) doesn't mean having otherwise unknown information. "Smarter", in this sense, can possibly mean increased learning capacity, better recall of information, being able to consider more simultaneous factors and solve more complex problems with less comparative effort. Lucy, regardless of how smart she is, cannot be more knowledgeable than the human species as a whole. So, she can't tell a bunch of advance-degree scientists things they don't know (other than that psychic powers exist). At best, she should be able to provide interesting hypotheses and various means of testing.
Starting with the premise it did, I had very little interest in this movie. But, I saw it with my father and little brother because, hay, something to do with the family. The premise just told me that there was little intellectual effort going into this movie that would expect me to see it as very smart. That said, I do these Cases, in part, because just about any premise can work.
That said, I don't think we have to with the 10% myth just for the sake of keeping to the original idea. Depending on how serious the movie needs to be, we can shift that over to something just a bit less (speaking as someone who used to believe this) stupid. A drug that increases the speed of neurons can increase thought speed. A drug that encourages the formation of new neurons could do the same. Or we don't necessarily need to know the science fiction behind it.
That said, with corrections, there are two movies to be had and the two could easily be merged into one.
In either case, we do need more characterization. Intelligence does not produce its own motivation. It can change a character, but without motivations already there, there's no reason for intellect to spur movement all on its own. A character can be termed "unmotivated" while still having interests and things that would motivate, but for a lack of confidence or some basic information.
We need a character so that we have an idea of where they would go with this intellect, at least at first, that seems plausible enough to get us involved.
In the action movie, one important element is for not just Lucy, as the main character, to get characterization, but also one of the antagonists. It doesn't have to be as much as Lucy's. As soon as she's identified to have become so much smarter, so alien, due to an overdose of this drug, it's up to the organized crime syndicate to choose one of their own to subject to a similar experiment.
If there are two people reaching more and more of a nigh-infinite potential, we have a reasonable conflict with something on the line. The movie that we have has, more or less, an omnipotent deity up against an organized crime syndicate. They can be as impressive as you like, but the woman with massive telekinesis and the power to cause groups to go to sleep at once... no, it's just not tension.
So, for this action movie, she becomes super-smart and is super-obvious about it almost right away, to the extent of becoming a significant threat almost immediately. They respond in kind and the result is two people, each getting smarter and developing mental abilities, in a conflict. The intellect, in part, involves the ability to consider and manipulate more elements at a time, which enables all the action scenes to have what would make this an imaginative and fun action movie, Rube Goldberg devices.
Each participant, putting things into motion that will put things into motion that will put things into motion. With positioning and manipulation and advanced bluffing, the action can and tension can be a mixture of action chess, Rube-Goldberg devices, and conversation amidst it all. This can be fun, even funny, all while allowing the increasing intelligence of the characters to come through.
The intellectual movie, the one that explores ideas, that can still have an antagonist equal or not. The end of Lucy tried to be intellectual and smart with her discussion of science and time as what makes things exist. It was nothing more than putting some kind of gift to mankind as the thing that was on the line. That made it less than interesting to me as a story element.
Philosophically, it's an interesting thought... but as a story element, it's not being explored in the story, it's just used to show "look how smart she is to explain this to top PHDs in their fields."
If this story wants to explore something, there are options for it to explore. It could explore the difference between intellect and humanity, oft-explored already but worth a look. It could explore the feelings of alienation when one thinks in concepts that are just not in the lexicon of other people.
But, if we want to do what Lucy tried, have an intellectual movie with an action movie in one, one of the best things to explore is the long term consequences of our actions and our values.
One thing about values, at least as I understand the concept, is that, once you get to the core of your values, there's nothing to justify them. You can explain how you come to hold them in terms of upbringing and evolution. But, in terms of your philosophy, you hold those values because you hold those values. Nothing can justify them because any justification would rely upon more central values.
With that, we can have a movie that has moments of high energy merged with action chess, Rube Goldberg uses of geography landscape, and two characters that not only conflict, but debate. Each one has their values, each one is acting to achieve their values. The question is what, when it comes down to it, are their values?
Intellect may be how humans differentiate ourselves from the animals, but it's our animal selves that make us use that intellect.
Or, maybe I'm just rambling on without a clear thought... in which case, I already have remade Lucy.
