I just saw this movie, and I have some things to report.

Lucy, as has been widely reported, centers around the “humans only use 10% of their brains” thing, and, yes, that is entirely not true. If you’re the sort of person who’s going to worry about that while you’re watching the movie, I think you’d probably be happier seeing something else. I just saw a nice trailer for some movie with Helen Mirren and an Indian restaurant, for example.

(The magic in Harry Potter, the warp drives in Star Trek, Middle-Earth, and the Force don’t exist either. Sorry 🙁 ).

Anyway, I thought Lucy was fun. Completely bonkers, yes, but fun. It’s a little like a lecture on the inner workings of the human brain as delivered by Quentin Tarantino (well, in that case it would have been even better, but that gives you an idea).

Lucy, who is a student (and apparently not a very good one since she’s supposed to be in college but she’s clearly around thirty years old), has a really sleazy boyfriend, who locks a mysterious briefcase to her wrist, gives her some really bad advice, and then gets killed. Lucy is in a state of 90% terror and 10% defiance for the next fifteen minutes, ending up with a big bag of drugs sewn into her “lower tummy,” which then gets ruptured, spewing the drugs into her system.

(By the way, this movie must be the most unabashedly pro-drug movie made since, you know, 1969 or something. The leaking drugs have only good effects; when Lucy gets into difficulties she snorts more drugs which make things better; and then at the end she gets all the drugs that were in the other drug mules, and, well, I won’t reveal what happens, but, as we used to say, wow, man. Far out!)

Anyway, here are two very pertinent links from The Atlantic:

1. “Scarlett Johansson’s Subversive Vanishing Act” (a very interesting commentary on three of her most recent movies — though I think they neglected to draw out some lessons from Captain America The Winter Soldier, the movie where the fact that her character is female is pretty much irrelevant — it’s not really a gendered role, which is interesting in the context of what they say about the other three movies).
2. “Lucy: The Dumbest Movie Ever Made About Brain Capacity” (This review made me like the movie much more than I did already — everything in the movie is a deliberate riff on people who are this clunk-headed and literal. After reading this, I want to see it again.).

The best scene is probably the driving scene, where Lucy pilots a police car through Paris at high speed, including zipping through oncoming traffic for periods of time, causing many accidents but not being in one. The cop whose cars she’s driving asks where she learned to drive like this.

“I’ve never driven a car before in my life,” is her completely deadpan reply.

I was going to write about Guardians of the Galaxy, too, but I’m having too much fun thinking about Lucy. Here’s my one thought about Guardians for now: It’s pretty good, definitely worth seeing, and if you jacked up the things which are good and dialed back the ones which are bad — a lot — it would be Serenity.