Idiocracy

Idiocracy is a 2006 American satirical science fiction comedy film directed by Mike Judge and starring Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard, and Terry Crews. The film tells the story of two people who take part in a top-secret military hibernation experiment, only to awaken 500 years later in a dystopian society where advertising, commercialism, and cultural anti-intellectualism have run rampant and that is devoid of intellectual curiosity, social responsibility, and coherent notions of justice and human rights.

The film was not screened for critics, and 20th Century Fox was accused of abandoning the film. Despite its lack of a major theatrical release, the film has achieved a cult following.^[2]

Plot

A U.S. Army librarian, Corporal Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), and a prostitute, Rita (Maya Rudolph), are selected for a suspended animation experiment on grounds of 'average' appearance, intelligence, behavior, etc. Rita's pimp "Upgrayedd" (Brad Jordan) has been bribed to allow her to take part. The experiment is forgotten when the officer in charge (Michael McCafferty) is arrested for having started his own prostitution ring under Upgrayedd's tutelage. Five hundred years later, Joe and Rita's suspension chambers are unearthed by the collapse of a mountain-sized garbage pile, and Joe's suspension chamber breaks through the wall of Frito Pendejo's (Dax Shepard) apartment, whose occupant expels him.

Joe, suspecting hallucination, enters a hospital. The former Washington, D.C. has lost most of its infrastructure, with people living in plastic huts called "domistile". The human population has become morbidly stupid, speak only low registers of English competently, are profoundly anti-intellectual, and are named after corporate products. When Joe is arrested for not having a bar code tattoo to pay for his doctor's appointment, he realizes the current year and society's state. At Joe's trial, Frito, acting as his (grossly incompetent) lawyer, causes him to be sent to prison. Rita returns to her former profession.

Joe is renamed "Not Sure" by a faulty tattooing machine, and takes an I.Q. test before escaping. Once free Joe asks Frito whether a time machine exists to return himself to 2005, and Frito agrees to bring him to the one about which he knows, after Joe promises to open a bank account under Frito's name in Joe's time, which will be worth billions by 2505. On the way, Joe reunites with Rita, and the three arrive at a gigantic Costco store, where a tattoo scanner identifies Joe as a fugitive. He is taken to the White House, where he is appointed Secretary of the Interior, on the grounds that his I.Q. test identified him as the most intelligent man alive.

In a speech, President Camacho (Terry Crews) gives Joe the job of fixing the nation's food shortages, dust bowls, and crippled economy within a week; whereafter Joe discovers that the nation's crops are irrigated with a sports drink named "Brawndo", whose eponymous parent corporation had purchased the FDA, FCC, and USDA. When Joe has it replaced with water, Brawndo's stock drops to zero, and half of the US residents lose their jobs, causing mass riots. Joe is sentenced to die in a monster truck demolition derby featuring undefeated "Rehabilitation Officer" Beef Supreme (Andrew Wilson). Frito and Rita discover that Joe's reintroduction of water to the soil has prompted vegetation in the fields. Frito shows the crops on the stadium's display screen, and Camacho gives Joe a full pardon, appointing him Vice President. Joe and Rita find that the time machine Frito named is an inaccurate, history-themed amusement ride. Following Camacho's term, Joe is elected President. Joe and Rita marry and conceive the world's three smartest children, while Frito, now Vice President, takes eight wives and fathers 32 of the world's stupidest children. A post-credits scene shows a third suspension chamber releasing Upgrayedd, intent on tracking Rita down.

Cast

Production

Early working titles included The United States of Uhh-merica^[3] and 3001. Filming took place in 2004 on several stages at Austin Studios^[4][5] and in the cities of Austin, San Marcos, Pflugerville, and Round Rock, Texas.^[6]

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.^[7]

Release

Idiocracy's original release date was August 5, 2005, according to Mike Judge.^[8] In April 2006, a release date was set for September 1, 2006. In August, numerous articles^[9] 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),^[5] and expanded to only 130 theaters,^[10] not the usual wide release of 600 or more theaters.^[11] According to the Austin American-Statesman, 20th Century Fox, the film's distributor, was entirely absent in promoting the feature;^[5] while posters were released to theatres, "no movie trailers, no ads, and only two stills,"^[12] and no press kits were released.^[13]

The film was not screened for critics.^[14] 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.^[10] That speculation was followed by open criticism of the studio's lack of support from Ain't It Cool News, Time, and Esquire.^[15][16][17] 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."^[16]

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 either its viewers or potential advertisers portrayed negatively in the film^[18] 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!"^[19]

Box office performance

Box office receipts totaled $444,093 in 135 theaters in the U.S.^[21]

Critical reception

Although it was not screened in advance for critics, Idiocracy received positive reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 73% approval rating, based on 41 reviews, with an average rating of 6.5/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Idiocracy delivers the hilarity and biting satire that could only come from Mike Judge".^[22] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 64 out of 100, based on 8 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".^[23]

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."^[24] In a review only 87 words long^[10] 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."^[25] The A.V. 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."^[14]

The film was also well received in other countries. John Patterson, critic for UK newspaper The Guardian, 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."^[26] Brazilian news magazine Veja 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."^[27]

Critic Alexandre Koball of the Brazilian website CinePlayers.com, 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."^[28]

Home media

Idiocracy was released on DVD on January 9, 2007 with cropped 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 its gross domestic box office revenue of under $450,000.^[29]

In the United Kingdom, uncut 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.

Spin-off

In August 2012, Crews said he was in talks with director Judge and Fox over a possible Idiocracy spin-off featuring his President Camacho character, initially conceived as a web series.^[30] A week before the 2012 elections he reprised the character in a series of shorts for website Funny or Die.

Analysis

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 does the short story "The Marching Morons" by Cyril M. Kornbluth, akin to the "Epsilon-minus Semi-Morons" of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.^[31][32]

See also

• Income and fertility           
• Fertility and intelligence
• Flynn effect
• Infinite Jest
• Sexmission
• William Shockley
• Sleeper
• "The Marching Morons"

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Idiocracy

• Idiocracy at the Internet Movie Database
• Idiocracy at Box Office Mojo
• Idiocracy at Rotten Tomatoes
• Idiocracy at Metacritic
• Scenes from the film at the Fox Home Entertainment YouTube channel.