What Pacific Rim promised was giant robots fighting giant monsters. And it delivered that, in spades. Nobody was thinking the pretext for that would make much sense, or that it needed to.
What “Lucy” is promising is an attractive woman with super powers stomping some evil gangsters flat. I bet it delivers on that. In this case, the pretext didn’t NEED to be nearly as stupid as it was. But Hollywood always lags behind written SF and pretty much ignores science, hauling out ideas that were laughably old hat 50 years ago as if they were brand-spanking new.
So, both movies make promises they keep, but Lucy is stupid because the pretext is stupid and old hat. Giant robots on the other hand are a fresh idea, and monsters from another dimension attacking the earth from a hole in the ocean floor is not nearly as stupid a pretext as a hot woman with superpowers.
Well, not to belabor the example I just posted, but the Pacific Rim corollary would be something like we need the giant robots because giant monsters are climbing up from outside the edge of the flat earth. That would be far, far stupider than the (still pretty darn stupid) Pacific Rim we did get.
Or we need giant robots to defend against the infinite stack of turtles the world sits on because the turtles woke up from a long sleep and are now attacking.
The pretext of “Pacific Rim” is fresh, even if it is the sort of thing a not particularly bright teenager would come up with after about 30 seconds of marijuana-fogged fantasizing. The pretext of “Lucy” is an old, thoroughy-debunked idea that no self-respecting SF writer would think of using except as a joke. And it would have to be a pretty damned good joke to justify using it.
Oh, and there are all sorts of MUCH MORE believable forms of SF jazz hands that could have been the pretext for Lucy: she could find her brain artificially amped up by nanobots designed to do just that, without saying she was originally using just ten percent of it. The drug could have been some sort of medical experimental drug that optimized her brain, once again without using the ten percent trope. It was a totally unnecessary bit of stupidity.
There IS no rational explanation for Pacific Rim, you go in expecting comic book logic and that’s what you get.
The 10% myth is asinine, I give you that. But I watched both movies, and Lucy works (once you get beyond the lack of internal logic) as an action movie. Not a great one, but a good one.
I won’t spend any time arguing about PR with you, since it already cost me 2 hours of my life.
And how do you even measure such things to be able to say it’s “bullshit.” You can’t. So, every remark on it is theory and speculation, which is what this movie is. Don’t tell me that “10%” is such bullshit, like you can plug numbers into a calculator, and that aspect, and nothing else, ruined the movie for you.
I thought it was mildly entertaining (until the end), and certainly wouldn’t let any pedantic notion like “10%” alter my opinion.
By far the more egregious aspect (to me) was when Lucy was chained to the wall and opened her legs to draw her captor closer, like every man thinks that getting in a girls pants is some divine privilege, of which, every man would certainly partake if only given the desperate opportunity.
I guess for me the problem is that the 10% thing is such a common misconception. Yeah, Pacific Rim was based on nonsense, but everyone knew going in that it was nonsense. Nobody thinks they learned anything from Pacific Rim, and it didn’t reinforce any wrong notions that people already had. Not so, for Lucy.
I agree that there was probably a much better way to write the pretext for Lucy. That might not have fixed the other problems, but at least it gets rid of the most glaring error. Hell, I might have even accepted internal parasites from a space truck stop egg salad sandwich.
As for Pacific Rim, the movie promised me giant robots fighting giant monsters. I went in expecting an episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion without the teenage angst and crazy Kabbalah of the anime and got pretty much exactly that. (There was still some angst). I don’t know what kind of expectations that was.
A movie about intelligence has to be intelligent; it cannot start off being stupid and progressively get stupider.
See that first clause? A movie about intelligence. Not a movie about monsters or robots or talking trees. A movie about what intelligence means and is and does. Intelligence is the subject of the movie. You can’t undermine the subject. If your movie is about giant robots menacing Earth they can’t look like Asimo. Especially if Asimo gave one punch of his mighty hand and split the Earth in two. But that’s what Lucy does. It’s a fraud and people are running out of the theater screaming “Fraud.” Besson punched intelligence in the face for 90 minutes and won. That’s why this stupid movie is not like all other stupid movies.
ETA: I started this thread because, well, hey, dumb movie. Kinda surprising to see it stretch onto a third page.
Also: there are a few posts that take shots at ScarJo. Interesting. I think she is great and is managing her career well - just happened to pick a clunker this time around.
Now I should back up really quick and say I really don’t know the motivations of Besson or the rest of his team here. Maybe they are truly as inept as they appear. But…
In Japanese culture, it’s actually considered insulting for a movie/story/essay to be too direct because doing that is insulting to the viewer. It’s saying “You’re probably not smart enough to figure this out; here let me lay it out for you like you’re a retard.” So the Japanese tradition has to walk a fine line. They want to provide enough hints so that you get it, but you should still feel like you figured something out all on your own.
Thus, something like the gangsters’ dialogue: it would be in keeping with that tradition to have the gangsters lying every step of the way, as long as you had enough information to know that they were lying. The fact that everything they do appears to be truly stupid just might be enough information to assume that their stated motivations are not the real ones.
And that all comes back to my point: if you think of this movie as a remake of Akira, then you’ll probably come out of the theater reasonably satisfied. Or, at least, with a hankering to go re-watch Akira and see it done right.
Yeah, I don’t know why people want Johanssen’s career to end, either. OK, yes, she’s the latest in a very long line of actresses who are successful mostly because they’re hot. But as soon as she fades from the scene, there will be three more right behind her. And unlike most such actresses, she does actually have some acting talent. Why not keep her for a little while before replacing her with a talentless pretty face?
I said earlier, and I stand by it, that the release of this movie has done more to dispel the 10% myth than 10,000 lectures on neuroscience. Every review and every article about it has noted that the 10% myth is untrue right up front. So I contend that the vast majority of people who saw this movie (and people who didn’t see it but just read about it) knew going in that its premise was nonsense. If only Besson would follow it up with a movie about the left-right brain myth, or the global climate change “conspiracies” or the Illuminati, we could start to get modern culture focused on real problems.
As for Pacific Rim, I knew going in that it’s premise was nonsense as well (as with Lucy, as with the Bourne movies, as with the Ocean’s # series, I did not expect to come out with a better understanding of the human condition), but reliable people and reviewers assured me that it was well-written and watchable.
Wow. I didn’t know that there was any actual basis for the belief, however wrong. I know that there are people who had hemispherectomies as children to solve intractable seizures, and they often regain normal function, but that adults who “lose” small portions of their brains to strokes often never fully recover, so comparing animals who may have less differentiated brains probably doesn’t reflect what happens to adult humans.
When I was 11 or 12, and I first heard the “10%” thing, I thought it meant that you used 10% of your brain, more or less, at any given time. Right now, for whatever task you are doing, you would be using about 10% of your brain. The next task you do would also take about 10%, but it would be a different 10%.
What did you guys want the movie to do instead? Obviously you can’t get real superpowers. Is it like, being bitten by radioactive animals is the only acceptable pseudo-scientifical explanation?
