Idiocracia

If you watch An Inconvenient Truth and Idiocracy I bet the next film you're gonna watch is "The Final Exit" by Derek Humphry.

This horror film depicts the future in a way not even Orwell or Huxley have considered. Far more dystopian than 1984 or Brave New World. Not even Fahrenheit 451 could have made me so worried about the future.

It haunts my nightmares now and I keep a defibrillator nearby all the time. I learned a better way to use it watching the last season of Breaking Bad.

Watch with caution. Don't let children watch it.

Very scary. Not for the faint of heart.

IDIOCRACY (2006). When this film came out, it was looked at as a broad satire of how infantile our culture could become. Now? Events may already overtaken it and made it seem too mild!

Mike Judge's tale is a riff on Woody Allen's SLEEPER where a man from the present ends up in a future he doesn't recognize. An "average Joe" (Luke Wilson) circa 2005 wakes up centuries in the future to find a world so dumbed down that he's the smartest man around! Joe meets up with Frito (Dax Shepard) and Rita (Maya Rudolph) and they end up in the orbit of the boisterous President Camacho (Terry Crews). Together they try to upgrade the intelligence of the American public - good luck with that!

Judge and Etan Cohen's screenplay is a bit scattershot at times, but it is fitfully hilarious too. The most popular show on TV is "Ow! My Balls!" about the various way a man's marbles can be whacked. Costcos are the size of cities and junk food is not only king - but, often the full meal. Again - is this really "centuries from now?". The supporting cast include Thomas Haden Church as Brawndo's CEO and uncredited bits by Sara Rue and Stephen Root.

Fox was so scared of the film it was barely released. Even when theaters requested the rights to show the movie, they were often denied. Of course, this only made the cult surrounding it only that much stronger.

Now, sit back, take a big swig of Brawndo and enjoy the future! Er...the present....? Past?

I saw this sometime back in 2009-10, and thought it was kind of fun, but completely over the top and ridiculous. It felt like a wafer thin plot used to run one cheap joke after the other, all based on roughly the same premise. That humanity's race towards stupidity, in 500 years time, has reached maximum peak.

Well... Guess what...

It is now August 2020 and I just saw this again, for the second time in my life. It turns out Idiocracy has transformed into some sort of Kafka'esque nightmare! When watching those first ten minutes after Joe wakes up in 2505, when he's walking around trying to get his bearings in the sea of morons, getting assaulted because he sounds smart, I wasn't thinking "this is beyond ridiculous" (like I did 11-12 years ago). Now I just couldn't help feeling totally frustrated about the whole situation, and empathetic with Joe. My wife, who was seeing it for the first time, reacted with a blunt "This is a total nightmare!".

Don't get me wrong now. This is still a great comedy, it has just gone from an over-the-top ridiculous one, to a prophetic piece of commentary on current society. It was of course just that even back in 2006, but it was just NO WAY to imagine how far (or low) we would have come in a mere 14 years. I think Mike Judge's estimate of 500 years is far too generous. We'll reach Idiocracy in no more than 100 - unless we manage to blow ourselves up before that, which actually seem far more likely.

Was this a missed warning sign? The current climate in America is kind of portayed here. Though some would argue, that it doesn't depict all of America, not even just the one side who seems to have a glutton for punishment and seems to like to vote against their own interests. So while there is some relevance to current events, this go far out.

Still if you feel uneasy watching this, it doesn't mean something is wrong with you. Quite the opposite is the case, everything is right with you. Quite ridiculous at times, it is there for entertainment purposes ... no really! They weren't trying to do a documentary! All kidding aside, this can be viewed as fun - no matter what your political background is.

A great film that was well before its time - for the petition to have Idiocracy moved to the documentary section place your thumb here - there's not much else to say other than it's real strength is in its realism; taking poorly-educated people into a future where education is no longer valued and intelligence is ridiculed and then watching them come to terms with this realisation (now i'm just filling space because the silly thing won't allow me to stop typing until i have fulfilled my quota of characters, which is in itself a pretty silly idea when you think about it - i just wanted to say it should be a documentary... ah okay, now we're done.