Preview: 'Lucy'

“The average person uses 10% of their brain capacity. Imagine what she could do with 100%,” is the tagline for Lucy, the new Scarlett Johansson speculative thriller, but isn’t it just as likely that the reason our average brains max out at around one tenth of their dimensions is due to an abundance of caution? Given our transcendent abilities to do damage to ourselves and those around us with that mere sliver of cranial capacity it seems probable on an evolutionary standpoint that the other 90% of our head-stuffing chooses to remain fallow from the firm conviction that exercising even another couple percentage points would result in destruction on such a massive scale that this species and all others which come in contact with it would perish from the face of the earth leaving not even the most rudimentary of traces, and while the prospect of such a planetary cleansing seems admittedly appealing — particularly on a hot day when the streets of our major metropolises are filled with putative adult males trundling around in shorts and flip-flops (and t-shirts bearing terrible double entendres suggesting specific sex acts their wearers would like to have performed on them) while they drink from plastic bottles filled with sugared water and careen about the sidewalks like clueless oversized babies, a group whom they additionally resemble in their utter disregard for anyone else walking alongside them — one supposes the brain is doing its part to prevent our speedy extinction and is instead hoping that by keeping the cap at the ten spot enough of us will muddle through somehow that the dumb shit we do won’t be immediately fatal, but will just hurt a lot until it’s all over, at which point it will be some other brain’s chance to fuck things up and hurt and be hurt and do everything it can to keep itself from feeling that sorrow that it has brought upon itself, not to mention the sorrow that has been brought upon it by the brains nearby. The more I think about it, the more it would make sense if our brains managed to drop their usage number down by about half — something at around five percent seems both more manageable and less lethal. Think about how happy everyone would be in a world which worked that way. Even if it’s impossible it’s at least the kind of movie I’d like to see, I guess. Lucy is in theaters July 25.