My interpretation of the movie Lucy (Spoilers)

First I would recommend that you watch the trailer:

Now lets get cracking...

There is some confusion about the main idea of the movie, but if you look closely at the trailer, or at the entire movie, there are two main ideas interwined:

• that human being normally only use about 10% of the brains capacities;
• if someone could have conscious access to 100% to the brain functions, the person should become a completely alien lifeform unable to be related by the rest of humanity.

These two ideas come together giving the main concept of the movie: what if a human being was able to progressively unlock the ability to use consciously all of his brain capacities, with an understanding of everything he is, and is capable of. What would happen to him/her and the world around him?

We have to understand that while the percentage of 10% may seem ridiculous and untrue, it is true though that throughout history there have been singular men that have made better use of the brain than their contemporaries and become heroes and legends, men like Socrates, Plato, Hipocrates, Archimedes, Copernicus, Nietzche, Pierre and Marie Curie, Einstein, Freud, Jung, still influence the world of today, long after they died. They developed each, their particular talent uncovering a part of reality, that was both their focus and to their reach, yet to them as to us there were still many mysteries to be uncovered. Now imagine having all their talents put into one person, and think of what that person could do, and what more could he discover about reality.

This is the main focus of the movie: what if one could access consciously the talents, inteligence, that have been manifested throughout history, and transcend it and unlock all the unknown potential that still lies in the human mind, what would happen?

In the movie, Lucy says:

"all this knowledge about everything, quantum physics, applied mathematics, the infinite capacity of the cell's nucleus, they're all exploding inside my brain. All this knowledge. I don't know what to do with it."

One could possibly unlock the secrets of the universe, and become like god.

Moving on, in the movie there are a lot of abilities that have been a part of western culture, like the more popular levitation, mind control, and telekinesis, or the more obscure like psychometry and bilocation (click here for more information). They are used in the logic that, if they are capable of being done by a human being, a person that had unlocked all of her potential would certaintly be able to do them.

The story then serves to explore these ideas, with almost all scenes having an underlying motive besides to amuse, giving context to the shallow entrapings of an action movie.

Lucy starts with a simplistic sci-fi premise: by absorbing a drug, Lucy is artificially allowed, progressively, to unlock the conscious use of all her brain.

Like you see in the trailer, the main character at the beginning is made to be the most ordinary and mundane of girls, but after absorving the substance her entire demeanour starts shifting to manipulative, uncaring, social awkward, obsessed, extra sensitive to the reality around her, becoming increasingly detached from the people around her, transcending normal human comprehension, becoming something completely alien. Like she says:

It's like all things that make me human are fading away...

This makes her an unusual character in a work of fiction. She apparently becomes invulnerable after ingesting the substance, but despite the apperances she is not. Her body and mind are changing faster than exponentially, which makes her overly unstable - you see her desintegrate in the trailer.

In the movie Lucy says:

"Professor, my cells are reproducing at a phenomenal speed, several million per second. I'm having trouble precisely evaluating the time of my death, but I doubt if I'll last more than 24 hours."

Also the first quote from the movie, posted here, supports this idea too.

The movie also dabbles into other ideas like :

- the imortality of the soul, when Lucy says in the movie: "We never really die.";

- Henosis, in the sense that the final step in the evolution of a being is fusing with reality, becoming an omniscient immaterial entity that is in perfect harmony with the whole of reality, and is expressed by the full use of reality;

- the behaviour of cells in reality, which her actions end up mimicking. In the words of the monologue presented in the movie:

[Looking to the future] "If its habitat is not sufficiently favorable, or nurturing, the cell will choose immortality, in other words, self-sufficiency and self management. On the other hand, if the habitat is favorable, they will choose to reproduce — that way, when they die, they hand essentialinformation and knowledge to the next cell, which hands it down to the next cell, and so on. Thus knowledge and learning are handed down, through time."

- the potential of the cell's nucleous, as the nucleous has in itself the DNA that encodes the whole human body, making it the source of all creation, recreation and maintence of the living body.

And with this, it ends my take on the movie Lucy.

If you agree or disagree about any part of the text, don't hesitate to post about it.

Cheers,

J.

I hate to be that guy who asks why two thread on Lucy are needed, but why not just post a link to your blog in the other thread? Not to be a jerk. I love movie blogs and I'd totally read and comment if I had seen the movie.

The other one was a discussion about the movie. This one is the explanation of my perspective on the movie, dabbling into themes that were not focused in the discussion, presenting my version of the answer to some of the questions that arose, and working to make all the ideas connected and understandable.

But yeah, it could have been part of the discussion, but it's prettier and more visible this way.