Monday Movie Review: Lucy in the Sky
Yeah, I’m posting this on a Tuesday. Whatevs. What are the days of the week anyway, but a construct in our minds? Honestly, these days, I pretty much never know what day of the week it is, so I’m rolling with it. The husband and kiddo were out of town this past weekend so on my day off (I was working the rest of the weekend), I took myself out to a movie. I had to trek all the way across town to the AMC that shows indies to catch this bad boy, and let’s just say, I don’t think it was worth the twenty minute drive.
Lucy in the Sky is “loosely inspired by” real life astronaut Lisa Nowak, who was wrapped up in a NASA love triangle about ten years ago that ended in her arrest for attempted murder. Though many details in the film were changed, the major plot points lay pretty close to the real life events. In the movie, Lucy (Natalie Portman) comes home from a mission in space, and though physically she seems to handle the transition well, it doesn’t take long for her to mentally and emotionally unravel. Which seems not far-fetched. I can only imagine what it’s like to be in space, let alone what it’s like to be in space and then come back to Earth. Hard to go back to washing dishes and folding laundry after seeing the entire universe laid bare before you. Lucy is hyper-competitive and an extreme overachiever. When her equipment malfunctions during an underwater training exercise, she refuses to stop her task, ultimately holding her breath for over two minutes to complete the job. When her emotions start to unravel, she leans on her fellow astronauts, which on the surface is a good plan since they are the only other people on the planet who have experienced what she has. Unfortunately, it leads her to start an affair with fellow astronaut Mark (Jon Hamm), even though she is married to what seems like the world’s best husband (played by Dan Stevens, hello). Lucy’s erratic behavior leads her to be pulled off her upcoming mission, which sends her into a total downward spiral. When she finds out Mark recommended she be pulled from the mission, and also finds out he is seeing another astronaut, she drives through the night to confront him while he and his new girlfriend are on a romantic weekend getaway. Lucy sprays him with insect repellent and is arrested.
Alright. I guess the hardest thing for me here is I just didn’t like the story. And it’s hard to get into a movie if the story just doesn’t sit right, and this one didn’t. It really rubbed me the wrong way that of all the amazing, strong, successful women there are in NASA, we’re going to make a movie about the one who loses it on her boyfriend when she comes back from her mission. Because we really haven’t been told enough that women are too emotional for these kinds of high pressure, high stress jobs. So I found the choice to tell this story kind of nauseating, to be completely honest (and of course, it was written and directed by men).
Before I figured out where the story was going and thus began to loathe it, it felt slow and the performances felt flat. I love all three leads, but none of them were delivering the kind of performances they’re capable of. There was also this really weird sensation in the beginning of the movie of not knowing what time period we were in. The clothes and hair all gave me late seventies vibes, but then they had newer cars and cell phones. It felt very disjointed, when I’m guessing the goal was to make them all look like small town residents? Who knows. It was unclear.
There were also a TON of very weird shots and camera angles that started about halfway through the movie and made NO SENSE in the context of the story. Like we all the sudden went from Lucy in the Sky being a literal title, to it becoming a reference to the movie being a total acid trip. I didn’t get the purpose behind them and it pulled me even further out of the film.
On the surface, I felt like there was a lot of potential with this setup. It’s interesting to think about the psychology of what happens to astronauts when they come home, and we don’t really see much about it in movies because movies tend to focus on the missions themselves. But I just thought the whole thing was handled so poorly. And yes, I get that it was a kind of true story and some of these things actually happened, but it left me feeling gross and kind of stabby and that’s not how I want to feel when I leave the theater. D+ from me.
