Idiocracy

This 2006 sci-fi comedy from Mike Judge, the man behind Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill and Office Space, was greatly anticipated by many Judge fans and disappeared without so much as a commercial ripple. Which was too bad since this movie is funny, but understandable since the zingers hit just a tad too close to home for the mass market audience.

Idiocracy stars Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph as two statistically average folks turned into test subjects on a military hibernation project in 2005, only to wake up 500 years later after being lost due to a scandal involving the scientist and general running the experiment. Instead of the idealistic flying car future we generally expect, the pair find that reproductive demographic trends lead to one where everyone is stupider than a pair of broken twigs.

The planet is dying, of course, especially since water’s been displaced by Brawndo, a sort of Gatorade, and half the population works for the company. Being the smartest man alive according to a prison aptitude test, Wilson is told to solve the world’s problems in a week, or else. Being of what we’d consider average intelligence, however, all he can think of is to tell people to use ‘water from toilets’ to feed crops and that doesn’t work fast enough.

Judge uses present-day trends, such as the increasing number of mindless TV game and reality shows, to extreme good use. Consumer-facing giants such as Starbucks and H&R Block are still around but their products have transformed into, er, brothels (e.g. lattes are handjobs). Wilson is very well-suited to the role while Randolph’s role is rather smaller and less demanding. Dax Shepherd is quite good as one of the smarter 26th century morons.

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