Okay, we get it. Homo sapiens as we exist today are wildly cognitively advanced from the furry, chimp-like creature gathering water between her fingers to drip into her mouth, while crouching naked in a stream. And yet, because we only use 10% of our brains, we're actually not as advanced as we would like to think.
Lucy isn't really about a young woman "attending" college in Taiwan in between drunk routs who gets caught up with drug dealers who accidentally make her brain into raw molecular power. It would be, if the first half of the movie didn't flash nature films among the actual events of the film. It includes cheetahs zeroing in on killing a gazelle while Lucy is entrapped by the murderous drug dealers, or cells splitting while Professor Norman talks about the possibilities in the human brain, or animals mating while Norman explains that cells choose reproduction if an environment is preferable.
The footage interspersed with the action of the film reminds us that despite our extra brain capacity, we are as much animals as cheetahs, and not much removed from the hominids that existed a few million years ago. But not Lucy. Lucy's powers just keep expanding throughout the movie, and her understanding of the nature of matter deepens.
She starts with the easy stuff, being able to glean and understand information in any form. Languages are no longer a barrier. She can process the written word in seconds. She can manipulate electromagnetic waves. She proceeds to actually altering matter with will, because she can now perceive the particles of matter themselves. This includes changing her appearance, or freezing other people motionless in the air. As the movie reaches its climax, and she approaches 100% brain capacity, she transcends existence as matter; she announces to one of her new friends that's she's everywhere now.
The climax is basically a whiz bang through history. Going back decades, then eons in one spot on Earth, Lucy is no longer bound by time. Even that has become a fluid she can swim through. It's her final trip on the original drug that started her journey, and takes place after she tells Professor Norman's friends that the only true measurement in the universe isn't distance, isn't anything that can relate back to humans at all. The basic measurement of the universe is time.
Lucy tries to be more than a high-tech, high-concept thriller with lots of violence. It has everything - trouble in foreign countries, a destructive car chase through Paris (what would our cities really be like if movie heroes like Lucy or James Bond actually existed??), a winner-take-Lucy gun battle between French police and Asian gangsters, an attempted rape that goes badly for the would-be rapist. But the high-stakes violence and mayhem are a pull for people to see the concept behind the film. The movie wants to expound on the theme of how expanding our brain capacity would help us truly understand the nature of the universe, but it has the good sense to mix in demos of Lucy evading her would-be killers and captors with her newfound mind powers.
These demos end up impressing the hell out of the other characters who interact with her: Professor Normal, Detective Del Rio, and her roommate Caroline. In fact, as she mind-powers her way through Paris, she accumulates a small group of protectors who are all blown away by what she can do and what she tells them.
Early on in the film, after the leaked bag of drugs has begun its work, Lucy knows her time is limited. It's why she calls her mother and recites a long line of new sensory perceptions and recovered memories that she can now access. Her mother is stunned and confused, but seems to hang up from the call without saying she's flying to Taiwan immediately to pick up her daughter. Lucy manages to turn the call into a vague farewell to her human self as well as her life. She can only spend her remaining time getting the rest of the drug necessary to perform the climactic experiment, and getting to the men who can help her pull it off.
Despite the movie being based on junk science, it's actually a good rollicking ride with a thought-provoking premise. Sure, we do actually use all of our brains, just not all at the same time (due to blood flow constraints). But, in the end, that's not the point. The movie makes the point that it's our brain's capacity, a physical constraint, that keeps us from being totally awesome and all-knowing. But, there are no physical constraints keeping us from deepening our knowledge of how the universe works. What if, given enough time (the true difference between us and our hominid ancestors), the human brain could perceive our true nature in the universe? Would it unlock the power of mind over matter? Or help us transcend a material existence completely?
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