Lucy (2014)

I think I thought the movie might be interesting when I first heard of
it, back when it came out.
Recently, YouTube brought the movie to my attention again.
SPOILER WARNING: after some introductory comments, this post is
primarily a discussion of how the movie ends.
I can certainly see why the critics panned the movie. The protagonist
engages in a car chase with disregard for
innocent human life at one point. This could be, of course, because of
how high the stakes are, but some might
ask if the movie is amoral, or just mindless spectacle.
And the movie is based on faulty science.
The old canard that we use "only 10% of our brains" is made into the
central core of the plot.
Another, less noticed, error is that the date of the origin of life on
Earth is given as one billion years ago.
The latest estimate is 3.7 billion years; I guess round numbers sound
nicer.
But a third scientific flub is that the drug that gives Lucy her amazing
powers, synthetic CPH4, is a synthetic
version of a substance secreted by women during the sixth week of
pregnancy that triggers increased brain
development in the fetus.
Aside from providing nutrition and oxygen to the unborn child, women
also help to train the immune system of
the developing child. But the pattern of development is guided by the
child's genetic program autonomously.
There isn't a female hormone to trigger brain development in the
developing fetus; there instead are good
reasons why such a thing wouldn't exist (basically more things can go
wrong).
(SPOILERS)
Some people have compared this movie to Limitless. While the two movies
have the same _premise_, I think their
endings are very different.
Instead, for a movie with a similar ending, I would go back to the movie
Starman.
In this movie, since Lucy is "everywhere", after Morgan Freeman's
character reads the contents of the USB
stick he was handed, with the words...
Life was given to you a billion years ago. Now you know what to do with
it.
Presumably, the USB stick won't just say things like "don't waste time,
effort, and lives on making wars"
which is all very well, but absent a solution for the case where the
other fellow doesn't want to go along,
not terribly helpful. After all, if Lucy is everywhere, she can get rid
of the nuclear arsenals of the
world's tyrants, and bring the world's drug kingpins to rout, and so on
and so forth. Also, instead of just
sage advice, the USB stick might include some technical help.
I suppose some could react to this as a form of cheating, but I'm afraid
it is impossible in principle for a
set of rules for living right oneself to solve the problem of the other
fellow, and thus also impossible for
it to bring about an earthly paradise straight away.
And, aside from the evil and wicked men who plague us with war and
crime, humans have a tendency to reproduce
at such a rate that eventually the ability of any given level of
technology to feed everyone sustainably will
be exceeded. Again I see those involved as difficult to persuade.
One in-between alternative, of course, is to include a technology that
allows one to run away from the
consequences of other people's actions, instead of the power to
coerce... which could be used by the bad guys
instead. Another possibility is for the revelation to be self-limiting;
people who choose to follow its
guidance for right thinking and right living also gain amazing psychic
powers that others don't have and
can't get, so the program of right thinking and right living has broad
appeal.
Ah, well. People hope for an escape from the predicament we're in. This
fuels religion, particularly its
eschatological element. Naturally, not actually having a solution, the
details must be avoided.
John Savard