A Retro Movie Review

This is a country where satirical humor is too often mistaken for silly humor, so to many, "Idiocracy" (2006) is a silly movie. Mike Judge, the movie's writer and director is a creator who's main objective is to beat his point to death, from the monotony of workplaces in Office Space (2006) to the stupidity of suburban teenage life in the "Beavis and Butthead" television series. He aims always to overdo things so that we will understand how overdone they are in our own lives, but usually leaves us with no real solution. We all can't display solo office mutiny like Peter in Office Space because most who work in offices have their lives wrapped around their jobs, and aren't willing to unravel it unles they're say, a twenty-something young man. The deeper problem in Mike Judge's projects is that the offices exist, that the suburbs exist, and in Idiocracy, it's that without a doubt, people everywhere are stupid.

The movie's protagonist is Joe Bauers, played by Luke Wilson, an Army librarian, and a slacker if only in terms of his complete disregard for initiative, is chosen for a United States Government experiment where an "average American" would be frozen for one year along with a private citizen. The private citizen is Rita, a prostitute played by Saturday Night Live actress Maya Rudolph. The problems that follow with the experiment are indicative of our current times. Corruption and mishandling lead to shutdowns, and then neglect. The year passed, and four hundred and ninety-nine more pass after. Joe Bauers awakes from his frozen sleep to a mess of a world.

Instantly sensory things are pressed upon the viewer. The local language is laced with profanities, everything is dirty and everyone is fat. Joe's speech, though normal in our time, seems wholly effeminate to anyone who hears. There is a real need to show the instant change in customs, but to also show how many of those future customs exist today, even if suppressed. The movie says that if we're oversexed, then we're going to be even more oversexed then, to the point where our species is out of control. The movie says that if we don't take care of our environment and bodies, then the neglect will begin to slowly destroy us. What's obvious and makes this movie pure satire though is that with the existing problems in the movie, the earth could not have possibly lasted past one hundred years after our time. If only the truly uneducated and unmotivated had children as the movie claims is happening now at a rapid rate, then in a century we will have compounded the damage we've already done to the earth with a swarming overpopulation and we will have created our own apocalypse with one or many scenarios.

So the movie, although realistic, isn't. If you can understand that. It's realistic that the movie is based around a search for a time-machine at a Costco, because to us, a Costco would have everything a person could possibly need. The Costco in the movie also has a greeter who says "welcome to Costco, I love you" on repeat, at all times. Mike Judge's genius shows the minor details of this movie. The F-word is prevalent everywhere in the movie, and it is quite common for the President of the United States to yell out "Fuck You!" when being greeted by supporters. So those going to Costco, the intelligent outcasts looking for a huge bargain like those same intelligent outcasts in our time need the opposite of what society usually receives to feel comfortable.

Companies and advertisements rule the country's psyche. The only way successful people make real money for themselves is to advertise on or use themselves. The American sensory overload is present on everyone's face, and especially on the face of Joe's state-appointed lawyer, Frito (many people in the movie are named after junk foods, as many in our society are named after liquors and brand names) played by Dax Shepard, formerly of MTV's Punk'd. Frito is a human display of the the sensory shutdowns taking place in everyone everywhere. He has trouble reasoning anything for more than fifteen seconds, and his favorite show is "Ow My Balls." He, like everyone everywhere has trouble expanding his vocabulary outside of fifty words. What Idiocracy claims will happen is that there will be an overtaking of our society by the uncultured and uneducated, whereas if now, we have three hundred million people, then fifty percent of them are wholly inadequate in intelligence, but five hundred years from now, there are maybe one billion people, ninety-five percent of which are inadequate in intelligence.

By the time you realize this, it scares you. It may be the third time you watch the movie that it pops into your head and you're scared for our future. It's why I personally believe that Judge chose five hundred years. He could have made it one hundred years and the pretentious Americans living now who believe they'll live for two-hundred years on Mountain Dew and Coldstone would have been too scared out of their minds to finish the movie. But in it's original release, almost no one saw Idiocracy, and it's cult following grew through key Showtime, Cinemax and HBO broadcasts. Idiocracy is a great movie for people who often open their eyes, look around, and wonder where all of this dumbness and numbness could possibly go. The answer? Nowhere fast. The solution? None in sight.