Why Lucy Was a Big Disappointment

While the character Lucy was promoted as the next iteration of “weaponized women”—that politically fraught subset of sci-fi characters—she turned out to be just another empty vessel.
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Universal Pictures

If you had high hopes when you went to see Luc Besson’s thriller Lucy this weekend, you might have emerged disappointed. The sci-fi (psy-fi?) film’s box office numbers dominated both its competitors and previous Besson movies (including The Fifth Element), and Scarlett Johansson’s performance is worth its weight in action-star gold, but critics have been overwhelmingly dissatisfied. Some didn’t like the “science,” some didn’t like Besson’s superficial search for meaning. But the real problem is one that’s a bit more crucial.

While the character Lucy was promoted as the next iteration of “weaponized women”—that politically fraught subset of sci-fi characters—she turned out to be just another empty vessel.

But let’s back up for a moment. “Weaponized woman” refers to not just any woman who gets superpowers but one whose abilities are a) dangerous, b) either present from birth or given to her without consent, and c) exploited by adversaries for their own purposes. (The Secret World of Alex Mack and Spider-Girl don’t count, for example.)

The trope has existed in film since the 1920s, when Fritz Lang and wife Thea Von Harbou made a weaponized woman one of the stars of their dystopian magnum opus Metropolis. Later, it would evolve as feminism and women’s rights helped filmmakers explore ideas of autonomy, reaching a fever pitch in the 1970s with stories like The Stepford Wives (1972), in which women are converted into cyborg servants by their husbands, and The Bionic Woman (1976), in which a woman gets with bionic parts to save her life and subsequently fights crime (as well as the specter of men who want to buy her). Later, television characters like Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager and genius-assassin-by-force River Tam on Firefly, as well as comic book characters like X-Men’s Rachel Summers (the daughter of Cyclops and Jean Grey, drugged and hypnotized to be a mutant hunter) and Batman’s Cassandra Cain (a.k.a. Batgirl, raised from birth by evil father David Cain to be a speechless, perfect assassin), made the trope even more powerful.

With Lucy, though, it's tough to figure out how the titular character fits into this concept. Of all the characters who could have potentially been weaponized (since there many more mules in the film's setup), why was it only Lucy who tapped into such power? To what end? Is she the subject of, or merely a central object in, her own story? What made her violent misfortune a story worth telling?

For Besson, those questions are beside the point. She was never meant to be a part of that legacy of weaponized women in the first place. “Transmitting knowledge was the big idea,” he told WIRED earlier this month. “[It was] to remind all these people around the world who are very powerful and very rich, ‘What’s the point?’ All this power most of the time is not well used in our world. It’s a way of saying, ‘Look, she’s got the ultimate power of everything and she gives in to it for everyone.’ I was very attached to that.”

And therein lies the flaw. Lucy isn’t really about a female action star, or one character’s liberation from the chokehold of Hollywood tropes—it’s about an idea. That's a great start, but it's not enough. If you're going to weaponize a woman, at least give her some ammo.