Gun-toting thugs and a vicious Asian mob boss are no match for the brawn and brain of the French director Luc Besson’s super-powered heroine in his sci-fi action-thriller Lucy.
Besson is known for creating strong female characters in La Femme Nikita and The Fifth Element.
But he goes a step further in Lucy, which opens in cinemas tomorrow, with an American student in Taipei who becomes invincible after the full power of her brain is unleashed.
Scarlett Johansson is the titular Lucy, a woman forced to smuggle a new drug that seeps into her body and lets her access more and more of her unused brain power.
“I think it is such an interesting imagination Luc has going on there,” says the Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman, who plays Professor Norman, a neurologist in Paris who tries to help Lucy cope with the startling changes taking place in her mind and body.
The professor has been studying the brain for most of his life, researching what would happen if humans could use more than just 10 or 20 per cent of it.
“We always think and hear terms like: ‘We only use 10 per cent of our brains’ – but did anyone ever imagine what it would be like if you could use more?” says Freeman. “So here comes Luc imaging what could happen if you could use more.”
Besson, who won France's César award in 1998 for The Fifth Element, had been toying with the idea of making a film about a person with superhuman intelligence for a decade, but he felt he needed to find the right balance between reality and science fiction.
With stunning visual effects, he shows how Lucy’s senses are heightened and how she develops superhuman powers and the ability to control matter. As her intelligence increases, however, her ability to feel emotions, empathy and pain diminishes, making her a super-proficient assassin.
As Lucy tries to channel her intelligence with the help of Norman, French police take on the Asian mob in a gun battle at the Sorbonne.
“With Luc Besson you have a knock-down, drag-out action film but then you have one that also makes you feel and think,” says Freeman.
“It gives a little spark to your imagination to say: ‘What if? What would I do? How would it be?’”
