Recent viewings

Idiocracy. I wanted to like this movie. I really did. It's the work of Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, and it has a premise that's tailor-made to his satirical view of the human race.

Like C.M. Kornbluth's famous tale The Marching Morons, Idiocracy explores what might happen if stupid people reproduce faster than smart people. Unfortunately, the subtle wit and humanity that characterize King of the Hill (if not necessarily Beavis or Butthead) seem to have been jettisoned in favor of broad, blatant lampooning of human stupidity. The jokes in Idiocracy land with all the subtlety of a brick to the head. Even worse, an obsequious, overbearing and totally unnecessary voiceover tells us the plot instead of letting us figure it out for ourselves.

The protagonist, an average fellow who works in an unchallenging job in a military library, is drafted into a human-hibernation experiment which goes awry. Along with a prostitute drafted as a female subject, he wakes up in the 26th century.

Meanwhile, as our narrator has explained in a fruity baritone voice, the human race has become dramatically stupid due to the difference between the reproductive rates of intelligent people, who use contraception and wait until they're economically ready for children, and ignorant idiots, who don't, and consequently multiply like rabbits "in the absence of any natural predators". This is dramatized through a series of vignettes featuring a high-achieving yuppie couple, who finally fail to produce any offspring at all, and "Clevon, IQ 84", a trailer-park lothario who impregnates every dimwitted female within reach, and consequently produces a family tree that looks like the old Prell shampoo ad. ("And so on, and so on....") The vignettes would have been sufficient to convey the premise, unless of course the film's producers thought their audience was too stupid to figure out the implications. If so, this would be a whole new level of irony.

The dystopia into which our hero awakes in 2505 is a no-holds barred depiction of a society that is collapsing due to a lack of common sense. Grunting morons spend their lives dimly masturbating to 24-hour sex broadcasts or burbling idiotically at one-joke shows like "Ow, My Balls!", which consists entirely of a man getting racked in different ways. Meanwhile, uncollected trash piles up to the second and third story of the dismal housing projects in which most people appear to live, and the trash that is collected is piled into comically absurd mountains of garbage that tower over the landscape and occasionally collapse, pouring avalanches of junk that swirl around the teetering foundations of decrepit skyscrapers and cascade through the streets of the cities. Crops die because their water supplies have been replaced with sports drinks in a bid to boost consumption and boost the manufacturer's stock price.

There are some clever sight gags buried in the background. If you look closely, you'll notice things like leaning skyscrapers "reinforced" with what appear to be giant rubber bands binding them to each other. Various catastrophes occur in the background, and are duly ignored by all. Fuddruckers finally achieves what its name has always aspired to be. And there is a certain amount of subtle irony in the fact that many of the problems of this "stupid society" -- ever-growing mountains of trash accumulated with "no plan at all for disposing of it", and environmental contamination justified because it "creates jobs", for example -- are in fact policies that our present society is pursuing by default.

Unfortunately, most of the characters which Judge places in this dystopia are so repellent that it's difficult to care whether they live or die. The protagonist is tolerable in a bland, everyman kind of way, but his female counterpart, while attractive, gets practically no help from the script or the director, and everyone else is so obnoxious that by the time I was halfway through the movie I literally hoped they would all die. Perhaps anticipating that any normal human being would have the same reaction, the movie concocts a way to force Our Hero into attempting to save the dimwitted descendents of humanity from themselves in order to save himself. But to say anything more would be to spoil the surprises (such as they are).

Perhaps my standards are too high. Idiocracy does at least have one or two provocative ideas lurking under its vulgarity, and I did laugh with it, although more often at a minor sight gag in the background than in the vulgar excesses going on in the foreground. Recommended with reservations.