Idiocracy (2006)
Directed by Mike Judge
To test its top-secret Human Hibernation Project, the Pentagon picks the most average European-Americans it can find - an Army private and a prostitute - 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.
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4 films that influenced Idiocracy
What critics say influenced Idiocracy
Judge is indifferent to anything resembling space or rhythm, yet the low-tech chintz of his approach ultimately enhances the caustic themes by making the futuristic atmosphere absurdly transparent; as with Godard's Alphaville, we are already living in the future, for how wide a gap really separates Date Movie and Failure to Launch from Ass, the single, unchanging shot of a gassy, naked butt topping box-office charts in 2025?
Inspired by Woody Allen’s “Sleeper,” it stars Luke Wilson (a much more tolerable actor than his more famous brother Owen) as Private Joe Bauers, who is a guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program.
A trashed-out landscape that's part zombie film and part broken-down "Blade Runner," the America of "Idiocracy" has become one vast junk food-entertainment complex, where bread and circuses take the form of super-size burritos and monster truck rallies.
If Mike Judge’s movie clout were an “Office Space” character, it would be Milton Waddams — consigned to cinema’s Storage Room B.
But before dismissing it sight unseen, it's worth remembering that Mike Judge's last film, 1999's Office Space, was released to groaning indifference, only to become a cult classic, and that Idiocracy is an unrepentant satire, a genre George S. Kaufman famously defined as "what closes Saturday night."
The problem with Idiocracy, more than with Office Space (which only achieved cult popularity in video release), is that the gags are often better than the scenes that contain them.
It had opened without any advertising and without being screened for critics, a strange end to a project that had been launched with plenty of publicity several years earlier, when Twentieth Century Fox finally convinced Judge to direct his first film since 1999's "Office Space."
Put simply, did Fox do to "Idiocracy" what it had done to Judge's 1999 comedy "Office Space," and was the new movie eligible for similar cult status?
He did so with “Office Space,” with “Beavis and Butthead,” and now “Idiocracy,” a movie that should be shown on screens all over America stating “THIS IS YOU” on the bottom of the screen in bold white letters.