Writer and Director: Mike Judge
Genre: Comedy (low-brow satire)
Remember Beavis and Butt-Head? Well, the man behind that duo, Mike Judge, went on to become quite successful, later creating the television series "King of the Hill" and writing and directing the movie Office Space. No doubt at least some of the people reading this have seen some of Judge's work, especially considering the cultural impact that Beavis and Butt-Head had during the early 1990's.
The Mike Judge project that many people have not heard of was the science fiction comedy Idiocracy, starring Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph and Dax Shepard. As far as I can tell, this movie had a reasonably impressive budget behind it (although not quite the same amount seen in, say, summer movie blockbusters) and, for some reason, 20th Century Fox only released it in a handful of theatres nationwide and gave it almost no advertising. The exact reasons for this are anyone's guess, although one might speculate that the movie's on-the-nose satire of corporate and consumer culture had something to do with it.
Idiocracy follows the character Joe Bauer (Luke Wilson), a slacker in the military who is, as is quickly revealed, an incredibly average individual in almost every way. His first assignment is to participate in a top-secret army experiment in human stasis; he and a prostitute, Rita (Maya Rudolph), are placed in large electronic pods, the plan being that they would be left in suspended animation for one year and released. Unfortunately, the entire project is scrapped before the year is over due to a massive prostitution scandal, and the two pods that contained Joe and Rita's suspended bodies are forgotten and wind up on a junk heap.
Five hundred years pass.
Joe and Rita are both released from their pods shortly after an enormous garbage avalanche, and find themselves in a world that has become a shell of what it once was. While one might have predicted that the human species would, over time, get progressively more intelligent, it has instead done exactly the opposite: people have gotten dumber and dumber over the years. What's more, it turns out that Joe (later given the nomenclature Not Sure) and Rita are now the smartest people in the world. Take into consideration that neither of them were very smart to begin with, and what we're left with is a movie about an exceptionally low-brow dystopia.
A number of people dismiss this movie for the same reason they dismiss most of Mike Judge's work: because he uses a lot of brainless, scatological humor. I, however, prefer to think of Judge as a master of low-brow satire, making countless jabs at not only consumerism and corporate control, but also the incredible inadequacies plaguing the masses in communication and critical thinking. In this future, the English language has completely degenerated into a mixture of "hillbilly, inner-city slang, valley girl, and various grunts;" the only thing missing was the use of Internet acronyms. When Joe tries to communicate with others, they only laugh at him and tell him to shut up; to them, he "talks like a fag" and comes off as pompous. One of the things that multiple watchings of this movie reveal are repeated grammatical errors and unusual product-related alterations in language--for example, the word "sympathize" has apparently been replaced with the word "supersize."
The satire on consumerism and corporations is easy to see in Idiocracy. For one, advertising is absolutely everywhere--people even wear disposable clothing covered in product ads. Advertising has also become a great deal more aggressive in the future: the slogan for Carl's Jr. is now "Fuck you, I'm eating!" One of the central plot lines in this movie is that, in the future, a sports drink company called Brawndo (Judge's take on Gatorade) had become so large that it was able to actually purchase the FDA and the FCC. This resulted in water being almost entirely replaced throughout the country by Brawndo, a product now being used in drinking fountains, to bottle-feed infants, to give to livestock, and to saturate the crops ("Brawndo: It's Got What Plants Crave!"). Water, in this future, is designated solely to use in toilets.
While this movie may have never gotten the publicity that it deserved, there are plenty of reasons why people should see Idiocracy. I personally think this movie is an absolute gem and a perfect example of Mike Judge's observational skill and sheer brilliance, and every bit deserving of cult status as Office Space is.
Genre: Comedy (low-brow satire)
Remember Beavis and Butt-Head? Well, the man behind that duo, Mike Judge, went on to become quite successful, later creating the television series "King of the Hill" and writing and directing the movie Office Space. No doubt at least some of the people reading this have seen some of Judge's work, especially considering the cultural impact that Beavis and Butt-Head had during the early 1990's.
The Mike Judge project that many people have not heard of was the science fiction comedy Idiocracy, starring Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph and Dax Shepard. As far as I can tell, this movie had a reasonably impressive budget behind it (although not quite the same amount seen in, say, summer movie blockbusters) and, for some reason, 20th Century Fox only released it in a handful of theatres nationwide and gave it almost no advertising. The exact reasons for this are anyone's guess, although one might speculate that the movie's on-the-nose satire of corporate and consumer culture had something to do with it.
Idiocracy follows the character Joe Bauer (Luke Wilson), a slacker in the military who is, as is quickly revealed, an incredibly average individual in almost every way. His first assignment is to participate in a top-secret army experiment in human stasis; he and a prostitute, Rita (Maya Rudolph), are placed in large electronic pods, the plan being that they would be left in suspended animation for one year and released. Unfortunately, the entire project is scrapped before the year is over due to a massive prostitution scandal, and the two pods that contained Joe and Rita's suspended bodies are forgotten and wind up on a junk heap.
Five hundred years pass.
Joe and Rita are both released from their pods shortly after an enormous garbage avalanche, and find themselves in a world that has become a shell of what it once was. While one might have predicted that the human species would, over time, get progressively more intelligent, it has instead done exactly the opposite: people have gotten dumber and dumber over the years. What's more, it turns out that Joe (later given the nomenclature Not Sure) and Rita are now the smartest people in the world. Take into consideration that neither of them were very smart to begin with, and what we're left with is a movie about an exceptionally low-brow dystopia.
A number of people dismiss this movie for the same reason they dismiss most of Mike Judge's work: because he uses a lot of brainless, scatological humor. I, however, prefer to think of Judge as a master of low-brow satire, making countless jabs at not only consumerism and corporate control, but also the incredible inadequacies plaguing the masses in communication and critical thinking. In this future, the English language has completely degenerated into a mixture of "hillbilly, inner-city slang, valley girl, and various grunts;" the only thing missing was the use of Internet acronyms. When Joe tries to communicate with others, they only laugh at him and tell him to shut up; to them, he "talks like a fag" and comes off as pompous. One of the things that multiple watchings of this movie reveal are repeated grammatical errors and unusual product-related alterations in language--for example, the word "sympathize" has apparently been replaced with the word "supersize."
The satire on consumerism and corporations is easy to see in Idiocracy. For one, advertising is absolutely everywhere--people even wear disposable clothing covered in product ads. Advertising has also become a great deal more aggressive in the future: the slogan for Carl's Jr. is now "Fuck you, I'm eating!" One of the central plot lines in this movie is that, in the future, a sports drink company called Brawndo (Judge's take on Gatorade) had become so large that it was able to actually purchase the FDA and the FCC. This resulted in water being almost entirely replaced throughout the country by Brawndo, a product now being used in drinking fountains, to bottle-feed infants, to give to livestock, and to saturate the crops ("Brawndo: It's Got What Plants Crave!"). Water, in this future, is designated solely to use in toilets.
While this movie may have never gotten the publicity that it deserved, there are plenty of reasons why people should see Idiocracy. I personally think this movie is an absolute gem and a perfect example of Mike Judge's observational skill and sheer brilliance, and every bit deserving of cult status as Office Space is.
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