Delayed Reaction: Lucy in the Sky

Premise: After returning from her first space mission, an astronaut struggles to reintegrate to "real life".

I was warned. From the moment it premiered, I was warned. I even kind of knew from the first trailer. Lucy in the Sky was not a movie to be seen. It's one of those movies that its Oscar dreams went away before the first screening was even over. Yet, it's a movie that has so many of the right pieces that I had to see it to really be sure that it was as much of a dud as people were saying.

After all, Natalie Portman has had pretty good success lately taking on big character projects with somewhat offbeat directors. Vox Lux was a big swing. So was Jackie, and the popularity of that topic netted her as Oscar nomination. Annihilation was plenty weird, ever if her character was normal-ish. The rest of the cast was made up of "TV All-Stars" who all seem on the cusp of having genuine movie careers: Jon Hamm, Zazie Beetz, Dan Stevens. Noah Hawley is a novelist turned showrunner turned director who made a big splash when he did the unthinkable: successfully adapting a Coen brothers movie into a TV show (Fargo). And, this movie is based on the Lisa Nowak story, which is mainly remembered for the diaper detail. All of these pieces prepared me for a movie that was either going to be trippy and awesome or a hot mess.

I never expected that it would just be boring. Like, people told me. Reviews told me. I just couldn't believe it was boring. I mean, Natalie Portman has a bowl cut and is really committing to an accent. That's got to be interesting. This is from Noah Hawley who was last seen turning Legion into an indecipherable but visually interesting mess. Is Zazie Beetz even capable of being boring on screen? I thought "no". Also, this is "the diaper story". Of course it will be nuts.

Honestly, I'm not even sure how the movie was so dull, even after watching it. It technically delivers exactly what I expected. Natalie Portman is intense. You can tell she really got into this role. She has a definite and traceable decent into madness. The end is a pretty extreme mental break. Noah Hawley loads the movie with shots that are more interesting than they are functional.

The main problem I ran into with the film was that it begins with the moment that breaks Lucy (Portman's character): when she's in space, staring at the infinite universe. She spends the rest of the movie intense and weird, and it's never clear how much of that is her personality and how much is a mental break. It's like watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers entirely after the body snatching happens. So, since I only ever see her after the mental break, I spent most of the movie wondering how this lunatic ever was allowed into space in the first place rather than wondering what about space broke her. When the movie tries to make a point about NASA being a "boy's club" and saying “too emotional" as a sexist dog whistle, all I'm thinking is that Lucy really is cuckoo bananas. Since I believe that the woman I see in minute 10 could already do the things she does by the end, the movie isn't really tracking a decent to madness. There's no built tension. Instead, I spent the whole movie knowing where it's going and waiting either for that to happen or for something to surprise me. God help me, but I almost wish Noah Hawley would've brought more of his Legion weirdness to this movie, as much as that show turned me off by the end.

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend