Idiocracy, 2006. Directed by Mike Judge, written by Judge and Etan Cohen. Starring Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepherd, Terry Crews, and the narration of Earl Mann.
A film so fundamentally lame that I’m not even going to provide you with a blurry still. This travesty is available anywhere you can rent lousy DVDs.
Everybody has good story ideas. Everybody. Writing good screenplays and making decent movies isn’t simply a matter of having great concepts, but of crafting a compelling plot, casting interesting actors, and pulling it all together under the watchful eye of editor and director. Talk to anyone who enjoys movies, and they’ll tell you of some story idea that they think is interesting. Chances are you’ll find the nugget of a decent story in the imagination of every single person you know.
Much has been made of the great concept of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, and even more has been made of 20th Century Fox’s decision to bury the film. Clearly, many critics have surmised, Fox is embarrassed by the film, whose central conceit–that in the future, an America weaned on Fox-style television has become so stupid that it can barely even feed itself–is so brilliant and scathing that Fox believed it must be hidden from the public. Watching Idiocracy, however, belies this: instead, one is struck even more by the sheer genius of the Fox Studios, for in allowing this film to get buried, releasing it in a handful of theaters without fanfare, and stoking the flames of conspiracy, they have, instead, guaranteed that critics will spend at least half their review complaining, the other half noting the great idea, and only a brief mention of how Idiocracy is one of the most ungodly stupid films ever made.
The idea is hardly original. A lazy soldier of average intelligence, Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson), is plucked from his easy job and put into a top-secret experiment. Apparently, the Army is interested in placing a man into year-long hibernation. The idea is that, if successful, we will be able to place our best people in deep sleep to use in the future (why this is considered a good idea is never explained). In a typically lame twist, the Army seeks out a prostitute, Rita (Maya Rudolph), to join Joe, obviously since Judge apparently thinks the Army remains all-male. Due to yet another mind-numbing turn involving the head of the program and whoring, they are forgotten, only to wake up 500 years later in a land that has become monumentally stupid. It gets worse: Bowers is jailed and is discovered to be the smartest person on the planet. He has to try to escape this crazy world, attempting to flee to a time machine buried in the bowels of a giant Cosco.
Mike Judge has been acclaimed for the way his movies and television shows tap right into the inanity of world, but like Beavis and Butthead and Office Space, he is really a writer who seems to have a dozen great ideas but no wit or ability to create decent work from these notions. Office Space has a spot-on opening but, like Idiocracy, devolves into a routine revenge/romance without a lick of intelligence. Aside from the fact that Idiocracy is marred with inconsistencies–the idiots of the future apparently have the technological smarts to keep electricity and television going, and someone had the knowledge to manufacture and maintain the dumbed-down machines–Judge seems to find his own jokes so damned funny that he has to repeat them over and over. Fuddruckers becomes Buttfuckers, a sports drink has replaced water, and work has become nothing more than simply pushing buttons with pictures on them. Language has retreated into grunting and yelling “Shut up!” or “Fuck you”, but that’s about it–a narrator has to remind us, over and over, that Bowers sounds “like a fag” for his intellectual way of speaking. What a decent writer couldn’t do with this future! Ebonics, grunting, text-messaging… the possibilities are endless, unmined, and therefore endlessly frustrating. And Judge seems utterly incapable to basic exposition, as he relies on a bland narrator to point out a number of simple things we should witness ourselves. His dystopia goes nowhere, and eventually the plot becomes yet another chase, yet another romance and redemption, and has a sweet ending that should make everyone smile. In the end, it’s perfectly OK to be as sharp as a bag of wet mice.
Ultimately, Idiocracy, like Office Space before it, seeks not to challenge us, but rather to cater to our base instincts–just like the people the film supposedly mocks. The idiots of Judge’s world–people who find Jackass a masterpiece (which is itself lampooned repeatedly with “Ow, My Balls!”, a futuristic TV show whose main character gets smacked in the testicles, over and over, throughout the film)–will find Idiocracy hilarious, and aren’t going to walk away thinking they ought to read. Of course, Judge has a moment where Joe Bowers, now the president, implores people to read and be smart. Just in case we didn’t get that point.
If Idiocracy does anything, it makes one hunger for wit and intelligence–I found myself plucking P. G. Wodehouse off the shelf and wishing I’d seen something like Monty Python’s Life of Brian, with its sex and political jokes, its attacks on religion and lampooning the fine art of Latin declensions. But then, maybe, in Mike Judge’s world, that just makes me a “fag”–and since there really aren’t any smart people in the film, Judge seems to share his characters’ beliefs. Watch Idiocracy if all you seek is a night of stoner laughs, but avoid it at all costs if you think it has anything to say about this world.
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