Lucy and Surviving the Brain's Cerebral Capacity

by Christopher Barr

Lucy is a Sci-Fi movie of oddly rare proportions; it was dumb to the point of insulting, filled with eye candy and trite action sequences that we’ve all seen many times before.  It is a movie that went beyond asking its audience to suspend their disbelief, and that’s even in today’s standards of alien abductions and superhero movies.  It’s also a rip off of Limitless and some of 2001: The Space Odyssey and The Tree of Life, and not for the better.

Lucy was about a young American student living in Taipei, Taiwan while attending school there.  Lucy is roped into a drug deal by her dubious boyfriend, whom she’s only known for one week.  The film cuts between meaningless ethereal National Geographic shots of strong animals chasing weaker animals, as Lucy is brought up to a hotel room and forcibly made, by Asian gangsters, to transport a plastic bag filled with a blue powdered drug in her abdomen.  The powder, it turns out, is a synthetic drug isolated from a naturally occurring chemical composite, that mothers pass along to their fetuses in order to create a jumpstart of sorts during a curtain stage of development.  

After being kicked repeatedly by one of her captors for not allowing him to feel her breasts, the plastic powdered substance in her stomach breaks open and leaks into her bloodstream.  This causes her to access more than the so-called normal amount of 10% of her brains cerebral capacity, and thanks to the exposition of the great Morgan Freeman, we are to take this theory of brain accessibility to be true.  The resulting effect is she has the powers of a superhuman, with the ability to alter matter and brainwash people.  She is able to absorb information instantaneously and move objects with her mind.  She also no longer feels pain or suffering and pretty well all other human, naturally occurring discomforts.  She is able to access her very first memories after birth, she can feel everything in her body and as a consequence she is able to discern her own impending death, which gives her a day at best to find the men responsible for doing this to her.

One of the glaring problems, other than the absurd pseudoscience which I’ll get to later, is the fact that she is unbreakable, she can’t be hurt, and she pretty well has no emotions or concerns about anything.  Generally good drama is designed around conflict; the main character needs to be in danger, or threatened in some way.  Here Lucy has not only alienated herself from her own human connectivity but she has alienated the audience from caring.  When are all the chips down for her, when do we grip our seats, worried that she might be in danger if she’s all seeing and all knowing?

She becomes cold and calculating and ultimately immaterial and that may work for villains like The Terminator or the Predator but not for the hero.  We need the Sarah Connor’s and the Kyle Reese’s so we can experience empathy, because without it, there is no magic trick.  This is an essential key to storytelling and it still surprises me to this day that Hollywood is still shilling out CGI crap that may look cool, but is lifeless.

Is that the state of things today in our technological savvy society of pseudo-connectivity?  Has the organic connection to people and the world around us become as cold as the stainless steel table at a mortuary?  Are we that far gone that this type of fair passes as a ‘smart’ person’s base entertainment?  If that’s the case then this is truly sad indeed.  The movie was about elevated brain capacity but yet it presented its own mythos using lowest common denominators.  They made a stupid movie under the deranged conclusion that it was for, and about smart people.

Astronauts went and saw the magnificent and fascinating film Gravity, knowing instantly that the science was off, but not by much.  They knew the filmmakers had to take a little bit of artistic licence because they were trying to tell a story, that just so happens to have taken place in space.  With Lucy, it’s clear that the filmmakers had no regard to the science and the understanding of the brain as neuroscientist’s understand it today.  They had no regard to evolution and quantum physics or applied mathematics.  They stepped all over pre-Socratic philosophy and post-structuralism like they were just new wave theories with their ink still wet.

Lucy contacts a well-known scientist and doctor, Professor Norman whose research, conveniently paralleling her current conditions, could be the key to saving her.  In an earlier lecture to of group of students and colleagues, Professor Norman outlines his theories on the development of the human brain and its actual potential.  He does this quite seriously, possibly allowing the naïve and ill-informed to buy into this gibberish because it’s being feed to them out of the mouth of Morgan Freeman.   An actor long respected as a truth bearer, a man known to be trusted and believed.  This cinematic trickery was used just earlier this year in yet another scientific unbelievable story in the disappointing movie Transcendence.

Speaking of earlier in the year, Bill Nye the Science Guy and Creationist Ken “human’s rode on the backs of dinosaurs” Ham, had a religious debate where Nye spelt out that science can explain most questions we as a species wish to know about the fundamental nature of existence.  Ken Ham explains that the Holy Bible is the true, one and only scientific book.  I bring this up because I’m wondering if the filmmakers got a supply of the same contaminated Kool-Aid that Ken Ham’s been drinking for years, so they can understand science through the eyes of a creationist.  A form of science where one can just make up any old crazy theory and say it is true, without actually supplying evidence to substantiate those claims.

Neuroscientists are well aware that the 10% myth is a false claim; they know that the entire brain in the healthy human being is operational at all times.  We use different areas of the brain when we are doing different activities like walking as oppose to sitting and watching TV.  It’s possible that this myth derives from our desire for a higher level of consciousness and not for some secret area of the brain, once turned on, allows us to fly or something.

This all goes back to people not wanting to put the actual work in, required to elevate one’s consciousness to a more responsive level.  We know that there are stupid people everywhere; we see them when we go to work, we see them all over the local Wal-Mart and for some of us, unbeknownst to ourselves, we see them in the mirror.  We also know that there are smart people out in the world too; they’re the ones that can’t believe that there are so many stupid people in a so-called technologically advanced society.  So we know there are different levels of understanding but we often confuse this with different levels of cognitive ability.  Unless you’re Einstein, everybody’s brain works the same, the dumb guy in McDonald’s asking for a Whopper has the same brain capacity as the philosophy student studying Hegel’s Dialectic.  The issue here isn’t capacity, it’s nurturing, the student is ‘applying themselves/their brain’ to what it is they want to understand, where the guy in McDonald’s has never been given the opportunity, or chooses not to take a chance at learning something new about a subject outside of a two block radius of his house and trash reality TV.

One of the problems in The Matrix is Morpheus taught Neo that the path to enlightenment is a path that can be shown to him, but it is up to Neo to walk it, the journey is the point.  He taught him to wake up to the realities of the world but he also had him ‘jack-in’ to their computer programming and had skills and knowledge simply ‘uploaded’ into Neo’s brain.  This process saw Neo, not learning anything but rather arriving at knowledge, waking up with programmed skills.  The problem with living in a fast-food nation is we want everything now; we actually don’t want to earn our way.  We want a pill like Bradley Cooper’s character in the suspiciously similar Limitless or we want the skillset of Bruce Lee without breaking a sweat.  We have become a society of spoiled brats that just want everything our way and rarely ever want to have to work for it.

After a boat load of silly ass-kickery, Lucy gets her hands on more of the Blue powdered drug and intravenously takes it all, promising to share everything she now knows with the Professor, once each cell in her body is controlled.  She then creates a supercomputer while her incorporeal self goes on an ‘acid trip’ through time (square) and space, from the beginning to the end of life, she then fills the computer with all her knowledge, essentially approaching the idea of Singularity, before vanishing and becoming “everything”.

The movie ends on an odd note of ‘what did I just witness, did she just say that, huh?’  Lucy’s last words to the audience, “Life was given to us a billion years ago.  Now you know what to do.”   In all likelihood and for the sake of one’s own sanity, it’s best to look at this movie as disposable, fun, forgettable and disposable, because to wrap one’s full cerebral capacity around it’s intricate simplicity, could kill one’s brain cells to the point of 1% capacity.