Rather a fan of Office Space, and at the constant brunt of an insistent friend's urges to make my way to this, I took the opportunity to watch Idiocracy on television when it appeared, despite a vague memory of being unimpressed at catching the start when I had seen it a number of years before.
Testing out new cryogenic technology, the U.S. military enlists Corporal Joe Bauers and private citizen Rita to go into a year long hibernation. Following the abandonment of the facility containing the pair, they are forgotten and are only awoken after 500 years. With the global population having become unanimously stupid, Joe now boasts the world's highest IQ, and is turned to to fix the problems of the dystopian society.
A social satire on the idiocy of modern American (primarily, though not exclusively) capitalist society from Mike Judge? What could go wrong? Well, the answer would appear to be just about everything, I'm sorry to say. For a film which purports to criticise the loss of intelligence in our current commercialist paradigm, Idiocracy is itself wholly stupid, idiotic, unintelligent, and downright dumb. Now, let's get a few things straight before we continue. I do realise that to effectively comment upon something, it is at times necessary to yourself resort to employing it. Would anyone dispute that This is Spinal Tap, despite iconically parodying the silliness of heavy metal culture, gave rise to a number of irony-free silly heavy metal concert tours from a very real and very silly heavy metal band? Certainly not. There is nothing wrong with becoming the subject of your discussion, indeed doing so is often necessary: would Unforgiven have functioned as well as a revisionist commentary upon the glamourlessness of violence in the western genre without portraying the violence of the western genre? An entirely rhetorical question. With Idiocracy, however, the situation is different. Judge employs idiotic characters and dialogue as well as lowest-common-denominator humour, but to what end? To show us the direction toward which our society is fast headed? Well yes, the character of Frito conveys this well, as do some of the circumstances in which Joe finds himself. But when we are shown a fast food chain eventually renamed to "buttf*ckers" (the asterisk is my addition), we are invited to laugh at it. Excuse me? Aren't we here to address the issue of stupidity in modern culture by examining an accentuated version thereof in a futuristic context? And yet the funniest thing the film— presumably, as one critical of stupidity, intended itself to be intelligent—can think to do is to have us laugh at how funny cheap profanity is. I just don't get it... The humour is lewd and crude, and relies heavily on profanity, sexual jokes, and exactly the things which characterise the dumbness of the society I assumed it to want to critique. Maybe it doesn't want to; maybe it really just wishes to provide cheap and stupid laughs. Either way, it fails to function entirely, neither amusing not satirising, just bemusing in its intentions.
Apparently intended as a scathing criticism of society's stupidity, Idiocracy is itself exactly what it claims to dislike about our modern world. Completely misjudged, appallingly and bizarrely stupid, and with a hideously uninteresting narrative to boot, it makes the popular "comedy" of Apatow and his ilk look genius, and by golly gum is that saying something.
Testing out new cryogenic technology, the U.S. military enlists Corporal Joe Bauers and private citizen Rita to go into a year long hibernation. Following the abandonment of the facility containing the pair, they are forgotten and are only awoken after 500 years. With the global population having become unanimously stupid, Joe now boasts the world's highest IQ, and is turned to to fix the problems of the dystopian society.
A social satire on the idiocy of modern American (primarily, though not exclusively) capitalist society from Mike Judge? What could go wrong? Well, the answer would appear to be just about everything, I'm sorry to say. For a film which purports to criticise the loss of intelligence in our current commercialist paradigm, Idiocracy is itself wholly stupid, idiotic, unintelligent, and downright dumb. Now, let's get a few things straight before we continue. I do realise that to effectively comment upon something, it is at times necessary to yourself resort to employing it. Would anyone dispute that This is Spinal Tap, despite iconically parodying the silliness of heavy metal culture, gave rise to a number of irony-free silly heavy metal concert tours from a very real and very silly heavy metal band? Certainly not. There is nothing wrong with becoming the subject of your discussion, indeed doing so is often necessary: would Unforgiven have functioned as well as a revisionist commentary upon the glamourlessness of violence in the western genre without portraying the violence of the western genre? An entirely rhetorical question. With Idiocracy, however, the situation is different. Judge employs idiotic characters and dialogue as well as lowest-common-denominator humour, but to what end? To show us the direction toward which our society is fast headed? Well yes, the character of Frito conveys this well, as do some of the circumstances in which Joe finds himself. But when we are shown a fast food chain eventually renamed to "buttf*ckers" (the asterisk is my addition), we are invited to laugh at it. Excuse me? Aren't we here to address the issue of stupidity in modern culture by examining an accentuated version thereof in a futuristic context? And yet the funniest thing the film— presumably, as one critical of stupidity, intended itself to be intelligent—can think to do is to have us laugh at how funny cheap profanity is. I just don't get it... The humour is lewd and crude, and relies heavily on profanity, sexual jokes, and exactly the things which characterise the dumbness of the society I assumed it to want to critique. Maybe it doesn't want to; maybe it really just wishes to provide cheap and stupid laughs. Either way, it fails to function entirely, neither amusing not satirising, just bemusing in its intentions.
Apparently intended as a scathing criticism of society's stupidity, Idiocracy is itself exactly what it claims to dislike about our modern world. Completely misjudged, appallingly and bizarrely stupid, and with a hideously uninteresting narrative to boot, it makes the popular "comedy" of Apatow and his ilk look genius, and by golly gum is that saying something.