In today’s video I am going to be recapping the events of Lucy, a 2014 Sci-Fi Film. Spoilers
ahead! You have been warned. Now like and subscribe if you enjoy.
The movie starts with the shot of an ape drinking from a stream and fast forwards to current
times. Lucy is an American student who is standing with her boyfriend outside a fancy
hotel in Taiwan. The boyfriend has to deliver a silver briefcase to someone in the hotel
but is trying to convince her to go instead. She refuses repeatedly to which the boyfriend
handcuffs her to the briefcase and forces her to go in.
She asks the receptionist for a Mr Jang. She’s told to stand where she is and a group of
men get out of the lift and walk towards her. They kill her boyfriend and take her away.
The anxiety she feels is built up more by showing a parallel between Lucy being held
and dragged upstairs and a deer being chased by cheetahs.
Upstairs, Lucy is brought in front of a Korean drug lord, Mr Jang. She makes her case in
English to him with the help of an interpreter. She tries to communicate her innocence and
begs them to free her of the suitcase, only to be ignored.
Jang’s mind is set on the briefcase. He’s paranoid about the contents of the case as
he doesn’t trust her now dead boyfriend. She says that she doesn’t know what’s
in the case. Ignoring her explanations, he gives her the code to open it. The translator
assures her that there’s nothing dangerous while Jang and his men stand at a safe distance
with plastic shields. He loses his patience at her and she, short of options, opens the
case. The men lower their shields and guns, having realized there’s nothing explosive
in the case.
Lucy describes the contents of the case- 4 plastic pouches filled with a bluish-purple
powder. Jang pierces one of the pouches. With the help of a straw, he takes out some of
the powder on a tray. His men bring out a feverish drug addict and force him to inhale
the blue crystals through the straw. After some coughing, he arches his back, his eyes
roll into their sockets and he laughs maniacally. Jang shoots him without a second thought.
He turns to Lucy and offers her a job which she refuses. The screen goes black as she’s
punched.
Somewhere in a university lecture about evolution, a Professor Samuel Norman explains how humans
only use 10% of their brain’s capacity and how we have grown exponentially with merely
10%.
Coming back to Lucy, she wakes up in a fancy hotel bedroom and feels a sharp pain in her
stomach only to discover stitches on it. She’s dragged to a vast room where an English doctor
explains to her that they have placed a tiny pouch of blue crystals called the CPH4 in
her abdominal region.
Other people with CPH4 pouches in their abdomen are brought in to be given tickets to European
cities where the pouches will be operated out of them and they’ll be freed from their
services.
Professor Norman’s lecture continues. He claims that the base purpose of life is going
through time. To achieve this purpose, cells choose immortality, that is self-sufficiency
or reproduction. Only in these two ways an organism can pass knowledge through time.
On the other side of the world, Lucy waits for an opportunity to escape but finds herself
chained in a cell. A man touches her inappropriately. When she doesn’t give in, she’s kicked
repetitively in the stomach. This causes the pouch to tear inside her and the CPH4 crystals
spread in her bloodstream. She reaches 20% of her cerebral capacity. The professor hypothesizes
a scenario where humans could access more than 10 percent of their brain capacity while
Lucy actually experiences it.
Lucy is still chained when her captor returns, but this time, when he tries to touch her,
she fights him and escapes. Breaking free with his gun in her hand, she kills the men
with him and gets shot in the process. She hardly notices it and feels no pain as she
takes the bullet out of the wound. On her way to the hospital, she realizes she can
understand the local language easily.
She forces a doctor to extract the bag from her abdomen. While she’s being operated
on, she calls her mother and describes the extraordinary sensory overload she feels because
of the drug. She recollects memories from when she was only a year old and says I love
you to her mother one last time.
The doctor takes the half empty pouch out and tells her more about CPH4. Organically,
it’s produced in tiny quantities to help form the bones of a foetus. He’s surprised
that she’s still alive, but she’s sure she has less than a day to live.
From the hospital she goes to Jang and stabs his hands brutally. She makes him feel the
pain she can’t feel as she telepathically finds out about the other drug carriers.
Then she goes back to her apartment and reads up all the research by Professor Samuel Norman
in a matter of minutes. She calls him and tells him so. He scoffs at her until she proves
that his theory about the human brain was in fact correct. She shows him what she can
do with 20% of cerebral capacity. She can control technology, electric waves. She can
control her own and others’ bodies and describes to him her emotional and internal symptoms.
The more knowledge she acquires because of her heightened state, the less human she feels.
She asks for his guidance.
When the professor gets over the shock of being proved correct, he tells her that the
purpose of life has always been passing on what has been learned. He advises her to do
the same. There’s no higher purpose than that. She ends the call by letting him know
that she’s coming to visit him.
On her way to Paris, she makes a call to the French police to tip them about Jang’s drug
ring. She gives the details of the people that will arrive in Europe with drug pouches
inside them. Her mind is at 30% capacity at this point.
The local police arrest the drug carriers at Berlin, Paris and Rome airports respectively.
Lucy, on her flight, starts disintegrating and panics. The only way to stop her cells
from falling apart is by inhaling more CPH4 in the plane washroom where she passes out.
She wakes up in Paris in a hospital bed- good as new.
She meets Del Rio, the French police officer she had tipped off, and he helps her to track
the men carrying the pouches. She realizes that Jang’s men are also in Paris trying
to seek the CPH4 pouches.
Jang’s men find the pouches before her and are armed and ready when she arrives. Brain
capacity at 60%, she moves them out of her way without even touching them and gets her
hand on all the pouches. Jang and his men hot on her trail as she leaves for the university
to meet Professor Norman.
A group of academicians and doctors await her. They set up a way to inject the remaining
CPH4 into her. Professor Norman argues that humanity may not be worthy of her sacrifice,
not ready for the knowledge she’s about to give to them. That it may only bring chaos
to us. She says that ignorance, not knowledge, creates chaos. She tells him she plans to
build a computer, transfer all her knowledge to it and give him access to it.
Outside the professor’s office, the French police come face to face with Jang and his
men. The gun fight quickly becomes intense.
Inside, the CPH4 is injected into Lucy and she’s on her way to achieving 100% of brain
capacity. When she reaches 70%, she sits and absorbs the energy, matter and the computers
in the room to make a new generation computer. A blast from the fight outside triggers her
cells and at 80% she can see anything in the world- from the Eiffel Tower, past the ocean
to present day New York City.
With a single move, she feels the past speeding around her till the time the American continent
only belonged to the Indigenous tribes. She travels back till she’s eye to eye with
the first female ape named Lucy. Lucy feels the ape’s touch and sees the creation of
the earth. Meanwhile, Jang makes it past the French police
and with a gun in his hand stalks towards Lucy.
At 99% she can see the nebulae, the gases and the infant universe. She sees protein
substances forming out of nothing. 100% shows her the very moment the universe came into
being.
Before Jang can pull the trigger, she vanishes into the computer of her making and becomes
it.
It processes and forms a device that it hands to Professor Norman. After he detaches it
from the computer, the computer disintegrates and so does Lucy with it.
Del Rio shoots Jang and asks about Lucy. As a reply, he receives a message on his phone-
I am everywhere.
Her consciousness exists without a body. It is everywhere.
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