Review of Idiocracy (2006) by Spencer S — 07 Jul 2013

Though director Judge was given very little money to make this film and was deterred from getting a proper release from 20th Century Fox, there's plenty to be excited about in this comedic look at pure chaos.

Looking at the degeneration of the American populace in the next one thousand years, Judge writes with a flourish, an excess of profanities, and a thoughtful look to the future. Everyman Joe Bauers is of average intelligence and is working in the basement of an army library, trying not to get fired and eventually gain his pension.

He is put into a military experiment with a prostitute named Rita, to be frozen for a year, but are lost and forgotten, stuck in slumber for a thousand years. The world has changed into one of gluttony, greed, and unusual uses of speech that mostly use four letter words and grunts.

The world is much stupider, and though these are some crazy extremes, they feel familiar and even scary at times. Some of the idiocy that is being poked at for laughs doesn't seem so strange when you look at YouTube comments and E! Many of the things that are wrong with this film stem from the fact that it is very low budgeted and didn't get much financing from its studio.

The effects in this film are laughably bad, and even for a low budget film they remain lacking compared to even basic green screen. Many of the backgrounds look so obviously fake and that detaches you from the world.

You feel a disconnect with the world, and that remains the basic problem, because Judge is trying to make the viewer see the parallels to modern life, and that doesn't come across if everything seems artificial.

Judge has always been one to look at life and see the possibilities for satire, including Beavis and Butt-head and "Office Space". There are so many complexities to the levels of understanding of the future and the way in which it is represented, that this film, for all its dullard sensibilities and lewd language, is as thought provoking as any film about dystopias and the erosion of our societal standards.