Lucy in the Sky: Review by @Kush_Hayes
Maybe this movie is too cerebral. Maybe this movie is ahead of its time. Its by no means perfect, but there is a lot of awesome in this movie and I feel it deserves a better theatrical audience than its going to get. This is being distributed by Fox Searchlight, so Im going to speculate that this is just falling victim to the Disney Fox merger and is being released due to just obligation. Which is a shame because this is a much better film than is being whispered about this week. Im also going to speculate that its because of this that theres been no promotion for it and in the promotion that does exist for it is very vague to what it is.
What do you mean by that?
Simply based on the trailer, I thought going into this, we were getting another 2001 or Interstellar which have both been duplicated poorly. This is neither of those or anything else, but more so a loose adaptation of a loose interpretation of the events after Captain Lisa Nowak went up to space for the STS-121 mission. Without knowing the full details of those events, its putting it lightly that things for her spiraled out of control in her life.
And after all that, names (and assuming details) have been altered just enough that adding “Based on Actual events” might be unnecessary. Natalie Portman plays Lucy Cola, All American Astronaut Texas Woman. I thought about adding an “And” somewhere in there but it didnt fit. And we meet Lucy already in space, just staring over the world in awe and wonder. Its a very pretty scene and understandably she wants to stay out there a few more minutes. From there our film is about her readjusting to life. And she ends up not so much readjusting as she does prepping for the next opportunity to go back up. We see the life Lucy comes home too and while film is subjective its understandable how after the event of going into space, she might look at her life much differently.
A lot of Lucys readjustment and preparation for the next mission is met with fantastic visuals and hallucinations from her POV. Theres a lot of shifting and adjusting of the films aspect ratio to correspond with Lucys emotions within the story which would make sense, except for the few times we are with different characters and no Lucy in sight, and only then, the altered aspect ratios dont make sense to me.
Lucy over time becomes more and more unstable and finally when we reach her breaking point, do things go off the rails performance-wise. Its not good. Its beyond manic, its pretty cartoony and then feels like we’re in a revenge movie for 15 minutes. I found this first half of the 4th quarter of the film the only negative here. While Natalie Portman is on screen 95% of the time, I would say its Hawleys visuals that are the star of the film. I had no problem transitioning with the continuing altered aspect ratio and found them pretty interesting. There are even things in the trailer that somehow didnt make it to the final cut of the film. I dont know what happened behind the scenes in that negative 15 minutes. I dont know what could be done to improve it. But it does stand out.
Everyone elses performance are fine, theres nothing that stands out but youre still happy to see Jon Hamm, Zazzie Beetz, Ellyn Burstyn and Jeffrey Donovan and hope this cast can do something together again sooner than later.
I am not familiar with Noah Hawleys TV resume, but I was very impressed with his feature directorial debut and I look forward to what he does next. Hawleys visual effects are done fantastic and their presentation makes Lucy in the Sky one of my favorite films of 2019.
Four out of Six Blueberries
Rated R for language and some sexual content.
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