I wondered why Mike Judge’s ‘Idiocracy’ was damned from the get-go by 20th Century Fox. It opened on 130 screens on September 1st, was down to 10 screens on by the 22nd and was gone by the 29th. Now that I’ve seen the film, it makes sense.
We’re shown two families to compare and contrast. The first is a married couple with above average IQs and they’ve decided to hold off on having children. The second have IQs in the eighties and are trailer trash cardboard cutouts. They can’t stop eating or procreating and their kids, despite a serious groin injury, do the same.
Joe (Luke Wilson) is an average Joe. We works for the military and it’s clear to the people that know him that his job - which apparently consists of sitting behind a desk and watching TV - requires no skill at all. He has no immediate family and no friends, in others words, he’s dispensable. He and Rita (Maya Rudolph), a prostitute, are thrown into a military experiment in which they’ll be frozen for a year. As retrograde-industrialization would have it, the military base is shut down and replaced by a Fuddruckers. They two remain buried under the burger joint for 500 years.
A garbage avalanche jolts their ice boxes and they wake up in the year 2505 when everyone is like way stupid and most insults we know have been condensed to “fag”. So much for the gay rights movement. The hit TV show is called “Ow! My Balls!” and the hit movie is “Ass,” a ninety-minute unbroken take of a naked butt that farts occasionally. It won eight Oscars (this parenthetical has been deleted by the mighty pen of Paul Haggis).
Joe is arrested for not paying his hospital bill (his doctor is played by Justin Long, I guess his Mac finally caught a virus). In prison he’s given an IQ test and to no one’s surprise he’s the smartest man alive. Instead of go back to prison from which he’s escaped, he becomes the Secretary of the Interior to President Camacho (Terry Crews) a former wrestler who constantly gives the finger while giving speeches.
2006 was the year when dystopias transcended genre. There was the documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ the action-packed ‘V for Vendetta’ (a.k.a. 1984 Revisited) and the gritty sci-fi ‘Children of Men’ among others. ‘Truth’ and ‘Idiocracy’ seem to depict a dystopian present as well, both suggesting the nationwide IQ leaves much to be desired. Thankfully though, ‘Idiocracy’ doesn’t share the groundless pretense of ‘V’. I guess Utopias are old-hat.
Thankfully, ‘Idiocracy’ clocks in at 84-minutes, which is hardly tolerable. As one would imagine, the DVD has few bonus features. There’s no trailer, which makes sense. There are deleted scenes, however. And let’s be thankful for that.
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