Scarlett Johannson, a partying student in Hong Kong, gets roped into delivering a briefcase to drug lord Choi Min-sik. She's made into a drug mule, with the stuff in plastic bags within her, but it gets broken and what looks like a kilogram enters her body. The new designer drug turns out to have the effect of opening up the connections between cells, so that she gains greater use of her mind. As she heads to Europe, seeking the other mules for what they carry, while trying to fend off Choi and his gang, she seeks out exposition machine Morgan Freeman, and cop Amr Waked for physical connection.
It's not the first time that science fiction has tackled new steps in evolution, from Olaf Stapledon's ODD JOHN, to A. E. Van Vogt's SLAN, to Theodore Sturgeon's MORE THAN HUMAN. Writer-director Luc Besson brings his METAL HURLANT sensibilities to the effort, and Miss Johannson gives a great performance as she goes from a hung-over airhead to an omniscient goddess in a a little black dress and Balenciagas.
It's the visuals, more than the bafflegab explanations, that makes this movie so compelling, with its weird CGI, time-traveling backwards from modern New York to T. Rex time, and big, black, self-building computers against a white background while Freeman and associates stand around slack-jawed, and Freeman explains exactly what's going on. It's all nonsense, but seeing is believing, and we see everything, inside, outside, and from today back to the fiery beginnings of the Earth.
It's not the first time that science fiction has tackled new steps in evolution, from Olaf Stapledon's ODD JOHN, to A. E. Van Vogt's SLAN, to Theodore Sturgeon's MORE THAN HUMAN. Writer-director Luc Besson brings his METAL HURLANT sensibilities to the effort, and Miss Johannson gives a great performance as she goes from a hung-over airhead to an omniscient goddess in a a little black dress and Balenciagas.
It's the visuals, more than the bafflegab explanations, that makes this movie so compelling, with its weird CGI, time-traveling backwards from modern New York to T. Rex time, and big, black, self-building computers against a white background while Freeman and associates stand around slack-jawed, and Freeman explains exactly what's going on. It's all nonsense, but seeing is believing, and we see everything, inside, outside, and from today back to the fiery beginnings of the Earth.