I fear for the future. It is a scary thought that this film so concisely captures the essence of our future. I would place this movie as one of the scariest films around, cause nothing is more frightening than real life and this isn’t far off the mark. Leave it Mike Judge to become the soothsayer of our generation, not only for the working Joe’s and Office Space, but also for the common man that we might somehow evolve into through centuries of low IQ’s and lack of reading comprehension. Idiocracy just might strike a chord with you, either because you are the people he is using as satire or for how eerie it is that might be right.
In 2005, Pvt. Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson) is a soldier chosen to take part in a secret military scientific experiment in which he will be put into induced hibernation for one year, along with a woman named Rita (Maya Rudolph). Bowers is chosen for the assignment because he is statistically the most average man in the Army, while Rita is a hooker ordered to do some community service; however, Bowers and Rita are forgotten when the military base where the experiment took place is closed down, and when they wake up in the year 2505, Bowers finds himself living in a society where intelligence has taken such a landslide he’s now the smartest man in the world. Can Bowers save America from its own remarkable stupidity, and he can he get the dunderheads around him to believe what he says? ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
This was destined to be another cult hit for Judge. Office Space and Extract kind of fit a niche audience, but both went on to be cult hits because of the satire and subject matter. Idiocracy was no different as it got a botched release window, retitled, cut and the whole bag of tricks that studios use to salvage a film to their liking. Idiocracy can be seen on television all the time, wedge between shows about people doing stupid shit and reality television. Sort of prophetic when you think about it as the film rails against the dumbing down of society through everything. From the opening sequence of an intelligent couple rationalizing having a child and some lower economic people just fucking because their biology tells them to. It’s eerie to think that this isn’t that far off.
While the satirical material is never in short supply, the film is funny in what it delivers to us. Sight gags are plenty, observational humor prevails and the satire of our mass consumption offers up the biggest laughs from the film. Whether it is destruction of our justice system, the eroding of our language to more grunts and short vernacular and finally the general chaos of the political system that is actually much better than our current one. All these things are littered through the short feature film that Judge worked. He still has the knack of delivering an entertaining film, while it manages to poke fun at our trending life.
Idiocracy is sadly just a film, but in a few decades it will become a documentary on our devolving as a society. Mark my words, soon enough we will be watching “Ass: The Movie” in theaters and our main source of nutrients will come from burritos and Brawndo and its electrolytes. But if we do go down that road, I really hope that we have a president as great as Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. God Bless America!
*images via RottenTomatoes
