Idiocracy

PLOT (spoiler alert!!!):

During the prologue, a narrator (Earl Mann) explains the story’s premise: that in modern society, natural selection is indifferent toward intelligence, with the result that in the future, stupid people (who reproduce more often) will greatly outnumber the intelligent.

As the story begins, Corporal Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), a U.S. Army librarian, and a prostitute named Rita (Maya Rudolph) are selected for a suspended animation experiment which is only supposed to last a year, but the experiment is forgotten when the officer in charge is imprisoned for having started a prostitution business of his own.

Five hundred years later, when the average IQ has dropped to somewhere in the low twenties, Joe and Rita’s suspension chambers are unearthed by the collapse of an immense pile of garbage. Joe’s suspension chamber smashes through the wall of the apartment of Frito Pendejo (Dax Shepard), who immediately throws him out for interrupting his favorite TV show, “Ow! My Balls!”.

Joe, suffering from a suspended animation hangover, makes his way to a hospital, where he discovers the year is 2505. He is arrested for not paying his hospital bill, and for not having a bar code tattoo. Frito, still mad about his broken apartment, turns out to be his trial lawyer, and his inept representation causes Joe to be sent to jail. Meanwhile, Rita returns to her former profession.

While imprisoned, Joe is renamed “Not Sure” by a faulty identity tattooing machine, and takes an IQ test before easily outsmarting the prison guards and escaping. Joe returns to Frito’s apartment to ask him whether a time machine exists to help him return to 2005. Frito claims to know of one, but agrees to help only after Joe promises to open a bank account under Frito’s name in Joe’s time, which will be worth billions of dollars by 2505. On the way to find the time machine, Joe and Frito find Rita.

They arrive at a gigantic Costco store, where Frito thinks the time machine can be found. A scanner in the store identifies Joe as a fugitive by his tattoo. He is arrested again and taken to the White House to become Secretary of the Interior, on grounds that his IQ test identified him as the smartest man alive. In a speech, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Terry Crews) gives Joe the job of fixing the nation’s food shortages, dust bowls, and crippled economy within a week.

Joe discovers that the nation’s crops are irrigated with a Gatorade-like sports drink named “Brawndo”, whose eponymous parent corporation had earlier purchased the US Food and Drug Administration and Federal Communications Commission. When Joe has it replaced with water, without visibly improving the crops, Brawndo’s stock drops to zero and computers automatically lay off half the population, causing mass riots.

Joe is sentenced to die in an unfairly-matched monster truck demolition derby featuring undefeated “Rehabilitation Officer” Beef Supreme (Andrew Wilson). Rita discovers that Joe’s reintroduction of water to the soil has finally prompted vegetation in the fields, Frito shows the thriving crops on the stadium’s display screen, and the President gives Joe a full pardon.

The President names Joe Vice President. Joe and Rita find that the “time machine” is a wildly inaccurate history-themed amusement ride (in which Charlie Chaplin was the leader of Nazi Germany instead of Adolf Hitler and World War II is depicted as a fight between dinosaurs). 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 Rita’s former pimp, Upgrayedd, where he seemingly starts to search the future city for Rita.

REVIEW:

I was in the mood for a spoof/satire tonight, and it just so happens that Idiocracy came in the mail. Making matters even more perfect, I was talking to someone about how our society seems to be getting dumber by the day, a central theme in this film. Could this film be an unlikely prophecy?

What is this about?

To test its top-secret Human Hibernation Project, the Pentagon picks the most average Americans it can find — an Army private (Luke Wilson) and a prostitute (Maya Rudolph) — and sends them to the year 2505 after a series of freak events. But when they arrive, they find a civilization so dumbed-down that they’re the smartest people around

What did I like?

Casting. Casting someone who is supposed to be the most average person you can find, no one fits the bill better than Luke Wilson. Pairing him with the always funny and unpredictable Maya Rudolph, who is playing a prostitute to his naive Army librarian is just inspired casting. Who would ever have thought that these two would have such great chemistry together. Surely, I didn’t, that’s for sure.

Silly. I think we can all agree that most people take things way too seriously these days. Well, think back to movies like Airplane!. That was a spoof that was silly beyond silly, even though part of tis success was that many of the actors seemed oblivious to the silliness. Maybe a better example would be Monty Python and the Holy Grail. This is a film that is out there, went on to become a cult classic, and did not suck. This film is in that same vein. Everything is so over the top and yet, like seeing a big wreck on the interstate, you can’t turn away.

The future is now. I can’t be the only one who notices how this future is a mixture of what we came to know on Futurama and what life is like now, to an extent. Isn’t that sad? Kudos to Mike Judge for being such an accurate prophet.

What didn’t I like?

Hispanic lisp. Maybe this had something to do with everyone’s dumbing down, but in the future everyone has some sort of lisp, and I’m not really sure why. If that wasn’t bad enough, a good majority of them seem to be of Hispanic descent. How that happened, I have no idea. Perhaps Judge is telling us that Hispanics are dumb in his eyes? –shrugs– I don’t know, but it certainly didn’t work for me as well as I’d imagine the filmmakers would have liked.

Mountains of trash. This is the second film to mention how we need to find a better way to deal with our trash, the first being Wall-E. There are similarities to both when it comes to these trash mountains, and I find that a bit disturbing. Either two people have the same morbid idea of what our future will look like, or someone at Pixar ripped of Mike Judge’s idea.

Sara. Casting a beautiful, talented actress like Sara Rue and not using her is a crime! she got so little use in this film, that I believe she went uncredited. OF course, given her character, I can’t blame her. There isn’t exactly a plethora of female roles for her in this film, either, but somehow I think she would have automatically made any role better, had they given her the chance.

Epilogue. I won’t spoil anything, but there is a short scene at the end of the credits that implied there would have been a sequel As far as I know, this never came to fruition, which leads that last scene to be nothing more that.

Idiocracy is not a good film, let’s get that out there. It is, though, a film that you can watch over and over again with friends, making jokes and playing drinking games. I thoroughly enjoyed watching this and can’t wait to watch it again! I highly recommend this to any and everyone! Again, it isn’t a good movie, at all, but the entertainment factor is high up there.

4 out of 5 stars