Idiocracy is not a good film and I have a low opinion of the style of humor of Mike Judge. Nevertheless it is talked about so much online particularly in the post-Trump world that I feel obliged to watch it. I console myself with the thought that it is at least short and technically counts as science-fiction. The basic premise isn’t too bad and its giant matte paintings to depict a crapsack world is actually kind of impressive. Unfortunately the film itself is as dumb as its premise, is thoroughly unfunny and just too mean-spirited to be likable.
Joe Bauers is a corporal in the U.S. Army who is content in his boring post of guarding the library. Due to his being average in every respect and his lack of a family, he is tapped to participate in an experiment. Along with a prostitute named Rita who is paid for her time, they are placed into suspended animation. The plan is to revive them after a year but an oversight leads to them being forgotten. Five hundred years later, America has become the idiocracy of the film’s title as the educated and the intelligent stop having children while the dumbest breed too much. Joe and Rita are revived when their suspension capsules are jostled by the collapse of a mountain of trash. The confused Joe at first believes that he must be hallucinating but comes to accept that he is in an America in which the number one movie at the box office is a single long-running shot of a naked ass farting, where everyone speaks in simple sentences and pays for goods and services using a bar code tattooed on their bodies. Meanwhile Rita finds that men are now so gullible that she can rake in the cash without having to do anything at all. Joe gets into trouble with the law for not having a tattoo but after IQ testing reveals him to be the smartest man in America is appointed Secretary of the Interior by the current President to solve the country’s problems.
Part of why I detest Idiocracy is that it uses a very irritating voiceover to provide a documentary-style exposition to explain how America has changed in the intervening time. The film assumes that the audience is as stupid as its subject matter and so overexplains everything as if all the large flashing signs and dumb behavior on display aren’t enough to go on. This sucks all of the energy and humor out of the skits so I couldn’t muster so much as a small chuckle at them. It’s consistently mean-spirited as well, both at the idiots of the future and seemingly at us who are watching this. There’s a tv show that is all about hitting a character in the balls but then when the actor of that show appears, has him being repeatedly hit in the balls by everyone else around him. Does Judge really think we’ll find this funny or entertaining? Is he mocking us at the same time for finding it funny? What’s more is that he doesn’t dare to be even-handed in his derision. The archetype that he keeps targeting over and over again is the dim male couch potato who gorges on junk food and mindlessly consumes vapid entertainment. But notice how he never dares to caricature women as dumb bimbos, the logical corollary of this scenario. Joe keeps getting into trouble for not having a tattoo but Rita never does.
About the only bits I liked are the vivid visualizations of this dystopic future especially when the camera pulls back to reveal the scale of this dystopia. Trash is everywhere, everything is worn and broken down and most of all everyone is seemingly inured to the state of the world. Ordinary people drive dinky little cars that are falling apart, their jobs consist of pressing buttons without any deep understanding of how the processes work and are distracted from all this turpitude by inane entertainment. It’s a very distinct vision which is to Judge’s credit. But of course it’s not anything like a coherent world worth serious consideration. We never see who builds and maintains the technology that they use, some of which seem quite advanced. Given the state of society, the death and injury rate should be over the top but it’s not like we see piles of bodies by the side of the road. I get it, it’s a comedy but I’d still hoped from its reputation that the future it paints would be more fleshed out than what we get.
It’s telling that for all Idiocracy gets often cited as being prescient, it’s rare to see clips of it out in the wild. That’s because there are no good short clips from it that tell a good self-contained joke. The premise itself holds promise but the film never properly delivers on that promise being too shallow and narrow in its conception of what the future looks like. It paradoxically wants to mock stupid people while still being reluctant to idealize the smart and the educated. On top of it all, it’s deeply unfunny, making it a film that you should read up on but don’t waste your time actually watching it.