Lucy (2014)
- To accurately portray their role in Lucy, Scarlett Johansson spent weeks conducting hands-on research and rehearsing directly with director Luc Besson.
- Despite initial studio skepticism, Lucy went on to gross over $469,000,000 worldwide.
Lucy is a 2014 French science fiction action film written and directed by Luc Besson. The film stars Scarlett Johansson as the title character, an American woman living in Taipei who is unwillingly drawn into a drug trafficking operation and has a bag of a powerful synthetic substance surgically implanted in her abdomen. When the bag leaks, the drug grants Lucy increasingly extraordinary mental and physical abilities, progressively unlocking higher percentages of her brain's capacity โ a premise based on the widely debunked myth that humans only use 10 percent of their brains.
Morgan Freeman co-stars as Professor Samuel Norman, a neuroscientist whose research on cerebral capacity provides the film's pseudoscientific framework. Luc Besson embraced the film's outlandish premise with gonzo enthusiasm, escalating Lucy's powers from enhanced cognition to telekinesis, matter manipulation, and ultimately something approaching omniscience. The film divided audiences and critics sharply โ those who accepted its fantastical logic as a vehicle for dazzling visual spectacle found it thrilling, while those who couldn't overlook the faulty neuroscience found it frustrating.
Scarlett Johansson anchored the film with a performance that transitioned from terrified victim to an increasingly detached, posthuman entity as Lucy's consciousness expanded beyond normal human experience. Lucy earned $463 million worldwide on a $40 million budget, making it one of the most profitable original science fiction films of the decade and further establishing Johansson as a leading action star following her Black Widow role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
