They keep jamming more and more into these movies and making them harder and harder to summarize. Someday I’m going to give up on discussing the plot and just list all the things I thought about and discuss what the audience did, sort of a meta-review, but that day is not today. I’ll do my best to hit all the high points.
Lucy
First of all, it’s wrong to say we only use 10% of our brain, or “cognitive capacity”, as it’s called here. The fact is, just sitting around listening to music lights up a good portion of the brain with activity, and concentrating on solving a problem involves even more, much more than a mere 10%. But it sounds good, doesn’t it? Admittedly it makes us seem like underachievers, but it also lets us imagine a time when the world will be a utopia simply because we’ve all figured out how to unlock our full potential.
Continue reading “Lucy”
The Avengers
You probably know the basics already: An impossibly powerful energy source, a Norse god or two, the original 1940’s superhero, a noted assassin, a narcissistic billionaire playboy inventor, and the world’s best archer. Okay, that last one ends up sounding a little lame summed up in so few words, but the effects of a well-placed exploding arrow should not be underestimated. Oh, and there’s an alien invasion. I almost forgot.
Iron Man 2
The thing about sequels (usually) is that they get more expensive and more outrageous. If you destroy ten cars in the first movie, you have to wreck thirty in the next, and if you make it to four or five, you’re destroying two-thirds of the annual output of Detroit. And the ways in which the cars are wrecked get exponentially weirder. A pile-up on the freeway isn’t enough anymore. A few sequels down the road (so to speak), filmmakers apparently feel required to throw them at airborne helicopters or have them melted down by an erupting volcano or something.