| Idiocracy | |
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Promotional poster |
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| Directed by | Mike Judge |
| Produced by | Mike Judge Elysa Koplovitz Michael Nelson |
| Written by | Mike Judge Etan Cohen |
| Narrated by | Earl Mann |
| Starring | Luke Wilson Maya Rudolph Dax Shepard Terry Alan Crews |
| Music by | Theodore Shapiro |
| Cinematography | Tim Suhrstedt |
| Editing by | David Rennie |
| Studio | Judgemental Films |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
| Release date(s) | September 1, 2006 |
| Running time | 84 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $2-4 million |
| Box office | $495,303 (original run) |
Idiocracy is a 2006 American film, a satirical science fiction comedy, directed by Mike Judge and starring Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard, and Terry Crews.
The film tells the story of two ordinary people taken into a top-secret military hibernation experiment to awaken in a dystopia wherein advertising, commercialism, and cultural anti-intellectualism run rampant and dysgenic pressure has resulted in a uniformly stupid human society devoid of intellectual curiosity, social responsibility, and coherent notions of justice and human rights.
Despite its lack of a major theatrical release, the film has achieved a cult following.[1]
Contents |
During the prologue, a narrator (Earl Mann) explains that in modern society, natural selection is indifferent toward intelligence, with the result that stupid people easily outnumber the intelligent.
As the story begins, Corporal Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), a US Army librarian; a prostitute named Rita (Rudolph); and (unknown to both) her pimp, Upgrayedd (Jordan) are selected for a suspended animation experiment; but the experiment is forgotten when the officer in charge is imprisoned for having started a prostitution business of his own. The military base is demolished, and a Fuddruckers restaurant is built on its site.
Five hundred years later, Joe and Rita's suspension chambers are opened by the collapse of an immense pile of garbage; whereupon Joe enters the apartment of local citizen Frito Pendejo (Shepard), and is driven from the latter by its occupant. At a hospital, Joe receives a confused diagnosis, discovers the present year, and is arrested for not paying his hospital bill and for not having a bar code marked on his left arm. Meanwhile, Rita learns to take advantage of those around her to earn money by erotic seduction.
Having been imprisoned, Joe is renamed "Not Sure" by an identifying machine, and takes an I.Q. test before escaping. Joe returns to Frito's apartment, asking Frito whether a time machine exists to help him return to 2005; whereupon Frito claims to know of one, but agrees to help only after Joe promises him billions of dollars. En route to find the time machine, Joe and Frito find Rita; and at a massive Costco, where Joe is arrested again and taken to the White House to become Secretary of the Interior, on grounds that his I.Q. test identified him as the smartest man alive. In a speech, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Crews) charges Joe to correct the nation's food shortages, dust bowls, and crippled economy.
Joe initially professes ignorance; but discovers that the nation's crops are watered with a Gatorade-like sports drink named "Brawndo", whose eponymous parent corporation had earlier purchased the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Federal Communications Commission. When Joe has it replaced with water, without visibly improving the crops, massive unemployment causes riots, and Joe is sentenced to die in a demolition derby featuring undefeated "Rehabilitation Officer" Beef Supreme (Andrew Wilson). Rita having discovered that Joe's reintroduction of water to the soil has prompted vegetation in the fields, Frito shows the thriving crops on stadium's display screen, and the President gives Joe a full pardon.
Thereafter the President names Joe Vice President; and Joe later finds that the 'time machine' mentioned earlier is a highly inaccurate history-themed amusement park ride. Joe is subsequently elected to the presidency. Joe and Rita marry and conceive the world's three smartest children, while Frito, now Joe's Vice President, takes eight wives and fathers thirty-two of the world's stupidest children.
After the credits, a third suspension vessel releases Upgrayedd, intent on tracking Rita.
Early working titles included The United States of Uhh-merica[2] and 3001. Filming took place during 2004 on several stages at Austin Studios[3][4] and in the cities of Austin, San Marcos, Pflugerville, and Round Rock, Texas.[5] Test screenings around March 2005 produced unofficial reports of poor audience reactions. After some re-shooting in the summer of 2005, a UK test screening in August produced a report of a positive impression.[6]
The film's scheduled release date was August 5, 2005, according to Mike Judge.[7] In April 2006, a release date was set for September 1, 2006. In August, numerous articles[8] revealed that release was to be put on hold indefinitely. Idiocracy was released as scheduled but only in seven cities (Los Angeles, Atlanta, Toronto, Chicago, Dallas,[Houston, and Mike Judge's hometown, Austin, Texas),[4] and expanded to only 130 theaters,[9] not the usual wide release of 600 or more theaters.[10] According to the Austin American-Statesman, 20th Century Fox, the film's distributor, did nothing to promote the movie;[4] while posters were released to theatres, "no movie trailers, no ads, and only two stills,"[11] and no press kits were released.[12]
The film was not screened for critics.[13] Lack of concrete information from Fox led to speculation that the distributor may have actively tried to keep the film from being seen by a large audience, while fulfilling a contractual obligation for theatrical release ahead of a DVD release, according to Ryan Pearson of the AP.[9] That speculation was followed by open criticism of the studio's lack of support from Ain't It Cool News, TIME, and Esquire.[14][15][16] TIME's Joel Stein wrote "the film's ads and trailers tested atrociously", but, "still, abandoning Idiocracy seems particularly unjust, since Judge has made a lot of money for Fox."[15]
In The New York Times, Dan Mitchell argued that Fox might be shying away from the cautionary tale about low-intelligence dysgenics, because the company did not want to offend its viewers,[17] noting that in the film, Starbucks delivers handjobs, and the motto of Carl's Jr. has degenerated from "Don't Bother Me. I'm Eating." to "Fuck You! I'm Eating!"[18]
| Film | Release date | Box office revenue | Box office ranking | Budget | Reference | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | United States | International | Worldwide | All time United States | All time worldwide | |||
| Idiocracy | September 2006 | $444,093 | $51,210 | $495,303 | #6,914 | Unknown | Unknown | [19] |
Box office receipts totaled $444,093 in 135 theaters in the U.S.[20]
Idiocracy was not screened for critics; its much-delayed release received virtually no publicity, and the film was initially distributed to only 130 screens. Despite this, the film received generally favorable reviews by critics. Rotten Tomatoes returned a 74% "fresh" rating based on 38 reviews by critics,[21] whereas Metacritic gave a score of 64% based on 8 critics, and a 7.4/10 rating by 81 site users.[22]
Praise focused on concept, casting, and humor; the worst of the criticism was directed at the film's release issues or at special effects and plot problems. Los Angeles Times reviewer Carina Chocano described it as "spot on" satire and a "pitch-black, bleakly hilarious vision of an American future", although the "plot, naturally, is silly and not exactly bound by logic. But it's Judge's gimlet-eyed knack for nightmarish extrapolation that makes Idiocracy a cathartic delight."[23] In a review only 87 words long[9] in Entertainment Weekly, Joshua Rich gave the film an "EW Grade" of "D" stating that "Mike Judge implores us to reflect on a future in which Britney and K-Fed are like the new Adam and Eve."[24] The AV Club's Nathan Rabin found Luke Wilson "perfectly cast [...] as a quintessential everyman"; and wrote of the film: "Like so much superior science fiction, Idiocracy uses a fantastical future to comment on a present [...] . There's a good chance that Judge's smartly lowbrow Idiocracy will be mistaken for what it's satirizing."[13]
In other countries the film was reviewed positively. John Patterson, critic for The Guardian (U.K.), wrote, "Idiocracy isn't a masterpiece - Fox seems to have stiffed Judge on money at every stage - but it's endlessly funny", and of the film's popularity, described seeing the film "in a half-empty house. Two days later, same place, same show - packed-out."[25] Brazilian news magazine Veja, the largest in the country, called the film "politically incorrect", recommended that readers see the DVD, and wrote "the film went flying through [American] theaters and did not open in Brazil. Proof that the future contemplated by Judge is not that far away."[26] Critic Alexandre Koball of CinePlayers.com (Brazil), while giving the movie a score of 5/5 along with another staff reviewer, wrote, "Idiocracy is not exactly [...] funny nor [...] innovative but it's a movie to make you think, even if for five minutes. And for that it manages to stay one level above the terrible average of comedy movies released in the last years in the United States."[20]
| Film | Rotten Tomatoes | Metacritic | Entertainment Weekly | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All Critics | Top Critics | Audience | |||
| Idiocracy | 73% (41 reviews)[27] | 67% (6 reviews)[27] | 57% (56,383 reviews)[27] | 64/100 (8 reviews)[28] | D[29] |
Idiocracy was released on DVD on January 9, 2007 with fullscreen and widescreen aspect ratios, deleted scenes, English and Spanish spoken language tracks, and subtitles in English, Spanish, and French. As of February 2007, it had earned $9 million on DVD rentals, over 20 times the limited theatrical release.[30]
On September 1, 2007, Idiocracy opened for cable and satellite viewers on the Cinemax premium channel, and started airing on HBO networks in January 2008. On February 15, 2009, the film received its basic cable premiere, shown edited for TV on Comedy Central. One written use of the word "fuck" was still shown, in the parody of the restaurant Fuddruckers known as "Buttfuckers" (removed since the premiere).
In the United Kingdom, unedited versions of the film have been shown on satellite channel Sky Comedy on February 26, 2009 with the Freeview premiere shown on Film4 on April 26, 2009.
The idea of a dystopian society based on dysgenics is not new. H. G. Wells' The Time Machine postulates a devolved society of humans, as do Aldous Huxley's Brave New World[31][32] and the short story "The Marching Morons" by Cyril M. Kornbluth.
In August 2011, Meghan Daum compared the behavior of notable U.S. politicians, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sarah Palin, and the US Congress to the characters in Idiocracy and has argued that in the United States, both liberals and conservatives claim that their opponents are contributing to an Idiocracy-like world.[33];[33] whereas Jackson Browne calls Idiocracy a 'great societal barometer'. [34]
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