Natalie Portman is headed to space and no I’m not talking about her triumphant MCU return as the Mighty Thor in Thor: Love and Thunder. I’m talking about Lucy in the Sky, the new sci-fi drama starring Natalie Portman from Legion creator Noah Hawley. The full trailer for Lucy in the Sky has been released and I don’t know if Lucy has any diamonds, but what she does have is a wild haircut. Check it out:
Noah Hawley has put some positively bizarre imagery on the small screen, but he’s really looking to outdo himself in his jump to feature films with Natalie Portman’s haircut in Lucy in the Sky. Natalie Portman once shaved her head for V for Vendetta but this haircut is a far more jarring transformation. It’s not a bowl cut exactly, but it’s bowl cut-adjacent; in the bowl cut family, if you will. We’ll call it the ‘Mike from Stranger Things special.’
This haircut folks, it’s not good. What is good though, all joking aside, is this trailer for Lucy in the Sky. Natalie Portman stars as Lucy Cola, an astronaut who returns to Earth after a mission to space. We see her in space at the beginning of the trailer and how she is completely enraptured, as I imagine anyone would be, by the grandeur and wonder of the expanse of space.
That life-changing, transcendental experience, gives Lucy a completely new perspective on her life and a desperate desire to return to the stars. Lucy wants, needs to go back to space and her singular desire will clearly prove challenging both personally and professionally.
It appears that Natalie Portman’s Lucy will be contending with some younger competition in the form of Zazie Beetz’s Erin for the opportunity to go into space. But while Lucy is working hard to show NASA that she deserves to go back, she is making some personal decisions that will have major consequences.
Natalie Portman played a self-destructive character in the brilliant Annihilation and Lucy looks to be engaging in some self-destructive behavior here, cheating on her husband Drew, played by Legion’s Dan Stevens, with Jon Hamm’s Mark. It’s not entirely clear if Mark is a superior to Lucy, but maybe in her desperation she thought she could get an advantage by sleeping with him. That turns out not to be the case, though, as he seemingly betrays her.
Due to the intense pressure to achieve something, combined with feelings of betrayal, Lucy’s life begins to spin out of control. It’s not unlike Natalie Portman’s Oscar-winning turn in Black Swan. Lucy's life at home now feels too small, and she begins to lose her grip on reality.
She seems to go off the deep end, intimidating Mark, tearing at the walls of her home and buying supplies at a hardware store, which is rarely a good sign. She even changes her appearance, which, given that haircut, might be the sanest decision she makes.
This trailer for Lucy in the Sky goes light on the more surrealistic elements and imagery that were present in the first teaser, but it appears that this will be very much a psychological film where we can’t necessarily trust our eyes or Lucy’s interpretation of events.
Natalie Portman excels in these kinds of roles and the film looks beautifully shot. Noah Hawley’s small screen work on Fargo and Legion makes his jump to the big screen for his feature directorial debut quite exciting and I expect Lucy in the Sky to be a highly original and compelling vision.
Lucy in the Sky launches in theaters on October 4. Check out our 2019 Release Schedule to keep track of all this year’s biggest movies and for the latest in movie news and trailers, stay tuned to CinemaBlend.
