Thoughts About Idiocracy [The Movie, not actual Idiots]

When average guy Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) volunteers for a military experiment to be cryogenic-ly frozen for one year he has no idea that his experiment would be forgotten about and he would wake up 500 years in the future. He awakes to a world so desensitized and ‘dumbed down’ by corporate sponsorship and advertisement he is essentially the smartest man alive. Though in a world where the most popular TV show is “Ow! My Balls!” and the most critically acclaimed movie is ‘Ass’ (which picked up the academy award for best screenplay due to it’s ‘farting’ script), this isn’t really saying much. This is the setting for Idiocracy.

It’s hard to think about Idiocy without comparing it to Mike Judge’s last movie Office Space. Office Space was a huge success because it took the nuances of office life and held them under a magnifying glass until they were funny. In essence, Office Space became the hit that it is, not just because of a cleaver script and unique characters, but because on many levels it made you laugh at yourself, and your own office life. Idiocracy obviously tries to capture this same essence and falls short. Instead the movie becomes ironic in that the largest laughs come from the same behavior the movie is supposedly trying to caution us about.

Still though, if taken at its surface value, and not compared to its predecessor, I found Idiocracy still entertaining and it garnished more than a few laugh-out-louds out of me. Even I can’t recommend it as a strictly Sunday afternoon rental. My final score would be a 5.5/10.

Are those buildings held up with... tape?