Summing up, Lucy is an extremely strange, entertaining, and sophisticated version of 2001. Oh right. Everyone said that’s a great film. It’s not. It’s a boring piece of pompous shit, which having said, I am now visualizing. Is it talking back to me? What does the echo from the bowl sound like? After seeing Lucy, the subject at hand, you might say 2001 could be a better film if you added Taiwanese gangsters, but you’d be wrong. Nothing can save it.

Okay. Fine. I liked HAL. Who doesn’t like HAL? He kills people. But 2010 is better. And that should tell you something. For films about Tell Us What It All Mean, Filmmaker That’s Experienced Nothing But Praise, the corrected list, in order of awesomeness/desire to provoke the reader is as follows:

1. Lucy

2. 2010

3. Mission to Mars

4. Solaris (2002).

5. 2001 (Solarit?) That’s numerical word play, but I’m leaving it in.

6. Solaris (1972)

7. Red Planet (controversial, I know, but Mission To Mars had that pretty cool mini-meteorite sequence. And, just for extra controversy, I’m not even going to bother to imdb to see that I didn’t confuse one for the other. I’ll leave combining them to number 8…)

8. Interstellar.

9. Solaris (1972)

My stars! I made a list! Isn’t there some button I can press that makes it so you have to click it nine times and the page has to reload to increase your rage further? Maybe you could click it, it would take you to zergnet, and then back here. Can you imagine? This blog is so far down the list, can’t even make zergnet.

Why is Lucy way, way at the top of its list that I didn’t make you click? It would be easy to simply just say add guns to conceptual theories of consciousness, but that’s not why I liked it. Don’t care at all what Wittgenstein has to say about consciousness, so I’m only going to care a little about what M. Luc Besson has to say about it. And a lot about what Shane Black thinks about it. Which is why he never would.

Anyway, all that stuff is a bit silly, having to do with the usual crap that family is good or something, and that we’re evolving and that’s also good I guess. I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying attention, and I mean that in the nicest way.

This is because this film does what so few films do: it distracts. It is great and pure filmmaking. Having just seen Interstellar, this is something that Mr. Christopher Nolan would do well to heed. After an unexplained montage of apes, cheetahs and mice in traps, we begin where it is so rare, and so interesting to: where things begin to happen. We don’t know that Ms. Scarlett Johansson is a disgraced wedding videographer with something to prove to father (he invented the star wipe, and she’s never lived it down). She wants to give up qat chewing, but her best friend is in the umbrella import/export business and needs a favor…all right, I’ll stop before from my lips to JJ Abrams ears and so on.

Lucy just starts. All we know: she’s in trouble, and she’s about to make a stupid decision. And then it just keeps going, with a hundred times the action, bits, and good ideas in 90 minutes that Interstellar had in its three hours. That, Mr. Nolan, is how you make a singularity.

At a very confused art house.

It is filled to the brim with energy, and this despite the fact that’s really only nominally an action film. This is the Kryptonite problem – how do you deal with a character who can do anything. M. Bresson’s unconscious answer is probably less cogent than how it was handled in Watchmen – which really needs a supporter, maybe I’ll write about it now – but it’s also much simpler: just have fun. It’s overloaded, and impossible, and ridiculous, but your mouth stays open the entire time. I would love this film if he didn’t pour all his money into (he did), if he was planning to make a sequel (he isn’t), and if it wasn’t, inexplicably, a success, which, unfathomably, it was.

It’s this last thing that thrills me. M. Besson went way, way out on a limb, and got some positive feedback. Because as depressing as the Second Peter Hyams rule is, it’s also wonderful. It’s time for his Lebowski. People will hate it. Critics will hate it. It will lose oodles of money, and utterly crush his soul.

But I’m going to have a blast.