While there are a lot of knowing smiles and tangential chuckles to be had at Mike Judge's latest film to attack the dumbing down of America, Idiocracy is ironically a victim of its own thesis. Is it a smart movie about stupid people or just a Saturday Night Live sketch blown up beyond sustainability? It is a 500 year future extrapolated from the slope of the downward cultural curve from exactly right now. Mike Judge has connected the dots from the A-Team to Steven Segal to COPS to Adam Sandler to Jackass Part 2 and drawn the line to 2505. Elements of the movie reminded me of flimsy future worlds of both Demolition Man and Pluto Nash. This is not a good thing.
The plot of the film is ludicrously simple. A military librarian (Luke Wilson) so average that he is the peak of bell curve in every military statistic available on him is selected (look for a cameo from Bottle Rockets Bob Musgrave) for a one-year cryogenic experiment. When the program is dismantled a few weeks later, he is left frozen until an accidental garbage avalanche opens the cryochamber 500 years into the future. The society he awakens to is so dumbed down that he is now the smartest man in America and smarter by a very wide margin. It is a fish out of water story, inverted so that everyone but the main character out of the water.
Much of the slim runtime (84 minutes) is spent watching the future citizens of Uh-merica talk in a patois of gangsta-slang, hillbilly grunts and corporate slogans (Idiocracys analogue for Edward James Olmos’ "Cityspeak" in Blade Runner). Luke Wilson's dumbfounded Pvt. Bowers does that Luke Wilson 'incredulous slacker' face he does so well (thus it is either a case of perfect casting or just typecasting). Unfortunately this joke gets a tad grating after about 20 minutes. Also testing the limits of patience is Mr. Voice-over man filling in the narrative gaps to keep things moving for those with short attention spans. Maybe it is a clever self-reference to the films future world which obviously translates to the present one, or maybe it was because Judge has a problem of connecting all of his jokes and concepts into a cohesive narrative, or even studio mandated reshoots (incidently the narrative bit was done far better in the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy trailer). This type of humour worked much better in the Beavis and Butthead short-form than in full length feature.
On the other hand, Idiocracy finds its chief source of comedy at the margins of the screen. The time is easily spent looking past the characters and simple plot and watching everything in the background, which is as overflowing as George Lucas' second Star Wars Trilogy. It is fun to watch all the rampant logos on the clothing (note each persons profession is down the sleeve of the shirt), or a triage nurse at a hospital selecting an inbound patients illness with one of those fast-food icon-only key pads. It is a fair bit smug, but amusing, to see the future versions of Starbucks, H&R-Block and Costco (even if the jokes are a bit dated at this point). And yes, Fox News is the only form of journalism in 2005 and Bill O'Reilly has thankfully been replaced with a muscled Anchor man who does the news nude (a bit light as satirical punches go, but after all Fox is paying for the movie - even if the Fox Execs dump it into theatres without so much as a trailer or even Poster(!) to promote it).
The things the movie has to say about mega-corporations buying the US government, rampant branding and product placement in the public sector, technology replacing common sense, and finally media driven law and politics is pretty kindergarten-variety satire. The question is whether you believe this is the movie making the audience feel superior in a Jerry Springer sort of way, or in fact this is actually an extra layer of satire. This type of meta-joke is funnier on paper than on execution. But there are also plenty of people being hit in the crotch with various objects for the peanut gallery the question is whether or not you laugh with the 2505-ers or at them.
Mike Judge's Office Space succeeded so well because there were actual characters developed in between the satire. Idiocracy, while not terrible, is just too far removed from reality and too much in love with its own concepts to overcome its character, story and pacing problems. Despite these flaws, the film is funny and clever enough to be well ahead of what passes for Big Studio comedy these days. It may earn a fraction of Office Space's cult status in spite of Fox spitting in Judge's face with such a shoddy theatrical release plan for (I'm guessing here) taking fusing the big corporate brands with gleeful profanity.
I may be stretching it here, but I expect Southland Tales to be the grown-up version of Idiocracy. I hope that is the case.