Review: Lucy.

Lucy 3.5/5

Luc Besson is by far one of the most entertaining writers and directors today. From The Fifth Element, to Leon: the Profeesional, Taxi, Taken and many other, his movies never fail to attract action lovers, but also never fail to introduce good ideas, simple emotions and a wide imagination. His latest movie, Lucy, fits perfectly into this description.

Lucy builds its story around the widely known myth* that humans use only 10% of their brain and imagines what could happen if a human used his full brain capacity.

The movie starts slowly and becomes faster as the events unfold and in the end unstoppable when the idea is fully developed. The director/writer doesn’t leave you unsatisfied; on the contrary, he stretches his imagination and gives you a fulfilling closure, and that is what I liked the most in this film.

Scarlett Johansson delivers a straight to the point performance. The intelligence and self-existence awareness evolutions of Lucy convinced me: her fear and ignorance at the beginning, struggle and adjustment in the middle of the crisis and the peace and acceptance at the end when she reaches the ultimate knowledge and enlightenment.

 Lucy might not be a perfect movie, but it’s surely entertaining, fun, witty and daring. When it ended I couldn’t keep the smile out of my face and I felt definitely more curious about life.

*Many scientists refute this theory and new studies on brain damage prove it wrong.

Abir Lebbos

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Her

Her 4.5/5

“Her” is the most bizarre yet familiar movie I have ever seen.

The idea of falling in “Love” with an operating system is a very improbable event for anyone of us, but what if it could just happen?

Think for a second about your relationship with your cell phone or with the internet. How do you describe it? Is it normal, healthy or very reliant? Note how all of these descriptions are humanly relevant, which makes me seriously wonder.

People have become more and more dependent on technology in every aspect of their lives. Some are becoming isolated and introverted and they tend to communicate indirectly via social media.

This is an issue that needs to be more addressed and that’s what the writer and director Spike Jonze  tries to do, by sharing with us a phase in the life of Theodore, a lonely unsocial writer, struggling with his feelings during a hard divorce. Theodore buys a smart Operating System (O.S.) and decides, to his bad luck, to give him a female voice. The O.S., which chose to name herself Samantha, will expand quickly and will soon become an entity, but not only a binary code one, but someone with feelings and personal ideas. It’s not long before Theodore falls in love with her virtual perfection.

What is really smart in this movie is that the director approaches this “love relationship” as if it is very normal. He places it in a society where it is very usual for someone to talk to his computer while walking on the road and he shows that all traditional phases of a two human’s relationship apply to it.

This movie presents an interesting idea and a phenomenon that is starting to form in our societies with a clever approach using a high caliber cast including Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson (playing the role of Samantha- we never get to see her in the movie)  Rooney Mara and Amy Adams who all deliver a outstanding performance.

This movie carries a very smart/ interesting message to us, something we miss to notice or to remember in our quick modern life “even the smartest operating system fails to understand the complexity of the human’s feelings and to satisfy his emotions.”

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