Idiocracy

''Idiocracy'' is a 2006 American science fiction comedy film directed by Mike Judge and co-written by Judge and Etan Cohen. Starring Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard, and Terry Crews, the film tells the story of Corporal Joe Bauers (Wilson), a U.S. Army librarian who, along with prostitute Rita (Rudolph), takes part in a government hibernation experiment. The experiment goes awry, and Joe awakens in the year 2505, in a dystopian world dumbed-down by mass commercialism, rampant anti-intellectualism and the domination of low culture, to find that he is by far the smartest person on the planet.

''Idiocracy'' serves as a social satire that touches on issues including commercialism and anti-intellectualism. The film was not screened for critics, and the distributor, 20th Century Fox, was accused of abandoning it. Despite its lack of a major theatrical release, which resulted in a mere $495,000 gross at the box office, the film received positive reviews from critics and has since become a cult film.

Plot

In 2005, U.S. Army librarian Corporal Joe Bauers is selected for a suspended animation experiment as the " most average" individual in the entire armed forces. Lacking a suitable female candidate, the military hires a sex worker named Rita by bribing her pimp Upgrayedd. When the officer in charge is arrested for running his own prostitution ring under Upgrayedd's tutelage, the experiment is forgotten. Over the next five centuries, societal expectations lead the most intelligent humans to choose not to have children while the least intelligent reproduce indiscriminately, creating generations of increasingly low intelligence.

In 2505, Joe and Rita's suspension chambers are unearthed by the collapse of a mountain-sized garbage pile, with Joe's chamber crashing into the apartment of Frito Pendejo. Wandering around what was once Washington, D.C., Joe finds a population that has become profoundly anti-intellectual, speaking only low registers of English and wallowing in overconsumption and crass popular entertainment. Technology is still advanced but often malfunctioning, driven by garish commercialism or extreme simplicity, such as healthcare workers handling computer equipment akin to elementary education software. Believing that he is hallucinating after a year of hibernation, Joe enters a hospital and realizes the truth. Arrested for not having a bar code tattoo to pay for his doctor's appointment, he is sent to prison after being assigned the grossly incompetent Pendejo as his lawyer.

Rita also leaves her chamber, resuming work as a sex worker, but soon realizes that people have become so stupid that she can charge customers money without actual services. Joe is renamed "Not Sure" by a faulty speech-recognition tattooing machine and takes a rudimentary IQ test. The police take Joe to jail. While in line to be admitted, Joe tricks a guard by claiming that he is meant to be released and runs out the door, successfully escaping prison. He finds Frito, who reveals that a time machine exists to return him to 2005, and Joe bribes him with promises of riches through compound interest on a bank account he will open for Frito in the 21st century. Leading Joe and Rita to the time machine, Frito takes them into a gigantic Costco store, where Joe is identified by a tattoo scanner and apprehended.

Joe is taken to the White House and is appointed Secretary of the Interior, as the IQ test identified him as the most intelligent person alive. President Camacho introduces Joe to the cabinet and gives him the impossible job of fixing the nationwide food shortages, dust bowls, and crippled economy within a week. Joe discovers that the nation's crops are irrigated with Brawndo, a " thirst mutilator" whose parent corporation owns the FDA, FCC, and USDA. When Joe has the irrigation system replaced with water, Brawndo's stock plummets, causing massive layoffs and riots, without any visible agricultural improvement.

Joe is sentenced to die in a monster truck demolition derby featuring undefeated "rehabilitation officer" Beef Supreme. However, Beef's oversized vehicle is crushed trying to enter the arena, and Joe manages to defeat the other vehicles. Rita and Frito discover that Joe's reintroduction of water to the soil has allowed vegetation to grow. Showing the sprouting crops on the stadium's Jumbotron prompts Camacho's presidential pardon.

Joe and Rita decide to stay in the future, although later they discover that they had no choice as the "time masheen" Frito mentioned is merely a childishly inaccurate history-themed amusement ride. Following Camacho's term, Joe is elected president and marries Rita. They conceive the world's three smartest children, while new Vice President Frito takes eight wives and fathers thirty-two of the world's stupidest children. The film ends with Joe's inaugural speech, where he praises earlier civilizations for their technology and expresses hope this society will one day as well.

In a post-credits scene, Rita's pimp, Upgrayedd, comes out of a third suspension chamber and goes looking for her.

Cast

Themes

The idea of a dystopian society based on dysgenics can be traced back to the work of Sir Francis Galton. H. G. Wells' ''The Time Machine'' postulates a devolved society of humans, akin to the "Epsilon-minus Semi-Morons" of Aldous Huxley's ''Brave New World'', as does the short story "The Marching Morons" by Cyril M. Kornbluth.

Production

Early working titles included ''The United States of Uhh-merica'' and ''3001''. Filming took place in 2004 on several stages at Austin Studios and in the Texas cities of Austin, San Marcos, Pflugerville, and Round Rock. Test screenings around March 2005 produced unofficial reports of poor audience reactions. After some re-shooting in the summer of 2005, a UK test screening in August produced a report of a positive impression.

Release

''Idiocracy''s original release date was August 5, 2005, according to Mike Judge. In April 2006, a release date was set for September 1, 2006. In August, numerous articles revealed that release was to be put on hold indefinitely. ''Idiocracy'' was released as scheduled but only in seven cities (Los Angeles, Atlanta, Toronto, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and Mike Judge's hometown, Austin, Texas), and expanded to only 130 theaters, not the usual wide release of 600 or more theaters. According to the '' Austin American-Statesman'', 20th Century Fox, the film's distributor, was entirely absent in promoting the feature; while posters were released to theaters, "no movie trailers, no ads, and only two stills", and no press kits were released.

The film was not screened for critics. Lack of concrete information from Fox led to speculation that the distributor may have actively tried to keep the film from being seen by a large audience, while fulfilling a contractual obligation for theatrical release ahead of a DVD release, according to Ryan Pearson of the AP. That speculation was followed by open criticism of the studio's lack of support from Ain't It Cool News, ''Time'', and '' Esquire''. ''Time''s Joel Stein wrote "the film's ads and trailers tested atrociously", but, "still, abandoning ''Idiocracy'' seems particularly unjust, since Judge has made a lot of money for Fox."

In ''The New York Times'', Dan Mitchell argued that Fox might be shying away from the cautionary tale about low-intelligence dysgenics because the company did not want to offend either its viewers or potential advertisers portrayed negatively in the film. This theory has been given extra weight by Terry Crews, who stars in the movie as President Camacho. In a 2018 interview with ''GQ Magazine'', he talked of advertisers being unhappy at the way they were portrayed, which affected the studio's efforts to promote the movie. He said, "The rumor was, because we used real corporations in our comedy (I mean, Starbucks was giving hand jobs) these companies gave us their name thinking they were gonna get 'pumped up', and then we're like, 'Welcome to Costco, we love you' elivered in monotone All these real corporations were like, 'Wait a minute, wait a minute' ..there were a lot of people trying to back out, but it was too late. And so Fox, who owned the movie, decided, 'We're going to release this in as few theaters as legally possible'. So it got a release in, probably, three theaters over one weekend and it was sucked out, into the vortex".

In 2017, Judge told ''The New York Times'' that the film's lack of marketing and wide release was the result of negative test screenings. He added that Fox subsequently decided to not give the film a strong marketing push because the distributor believed it would develop a cult following through word-of-mouth and recoup its budget through home video sales, as Judge's previous film '' Office Space'' had.

Box office

Box office receipts totaled $444,093 in the U.S., with the widest release being 135 theaters.

Reception

Although it was not screened in advance for critics, ''Idiocracy'' received positive reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a score of 71%, with an average rating of 6.4/10, based on 52 reviews. The website's "Critics Consensus" for the film reads, "Frustratingly uneven yet enjoyable overall, ''Idiocracy'' skewers society's devolution with an amiably goofy yet deceptively barbed wit." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 66 out of 100, based on reviews from 12 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

''Los Angeles Times'' reviewer Carina Chocano described it as "spot on" satire and a "pitch-black, bleakly hilarious vision of an American future", although the "plot, naturally, is silly and not exactly bound by logic. But it's Judge's gimlet-eyed knack for nightmarish extrapolation that makes ''Idiocracy'' a cathartic delight." In an ''Entertainment Weekly'' review only 87 words long, Joshua Rich gave the film an "EW Grade" of "D", stating that "Mike Judge implores us to reflect on a future in which Britney and K-Fed are like the new Adam and Eve." ''The A.V. Club''s Nathan Rabin found Luke Wilson "perfectly cast ... as a quintessential everyman"; and wrote of the film: "Like so much superior science fiction, ''Idiocracy'' uses a fantastical future to comment on a present. ... There's a good chance that Judge's smartly lowbrow ''Idiocracy'' will be mistaken for what it's satirizing."

The film was also well received in other countries. John Patterson, critic for ''The Guardian'', wrote, "''Idiocracy'' isn't a masterpiece—Fox seems to have stiffed Judge on money at every stage—but it's endlessly funny", and of the film's popularity, described seeing the film "in a half-empty house. Two days later, same place, same show—packed-out." Brazilian news magazine '' Veja'' called the film "politically incorrect", recommending that readers see the DVD and wrote "the film went flying through mericantheaters and did not open in Brazil. Proof that the future contemplated by Judge is not that far away."

Critic Alexandre Koball, of the Brazilian website CinePlayers.com, gave the movie a score of 5 out of 5. Another staff reviewer wrote, "''Idiocracy'' is not exactly ... funny nor ... innovative but it's a movie to make you think, even if for five minutes. And for that it manages to stay one level above the terrible average of comedy movies released in the last years in the United States."

Home media

''Idiocracy'' was released on DVD on January 9, 2007. It has earned $9 million on DVD rentals, over 20 times its gross domestic box office revenue of under $450,000.

In the United Kingdom, uncut versions of the film were shown on satellite channel Sky Comedy on February 26, 2009, with the Freeview premiere shown on Film4 on April 26, 2009.

Legacy

During the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, writer Etan Cohen and others expressed opinions that the film's predictions were converging on accuracy, a sentiment repeated by director Judge during the United States general election that year. At the time, Judge also compared Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump—later elected President of the United States—to the film's wrestler-turned-president, Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. When asked about predicting the future, he remarked, "I'm no prophet, I was off by 490 years."

Comparisons have been made between the film and Trump's presidency. An article for ''Collider'' pointed out the ways in which Trump's positions echoed the political decisions of the characters in the film in areas such as science, business, entertainment, environment, healthcare, law enforcement, and politics. Internet memes have spawned comparisons to Trump and characters in the film.

'' Salon'' writer Adam Johnson warned against using the film as a simplistic shorthand for the Trump administration, and accused the film of supporting eugenics, saying, "While the movie is savvy enough to avoid overt racism, it dives head first into gross classism."

Spin-offs

In August 2012, Crews said he was in talks with director Judge and Fox over a possible ''Idiocracy'' spin-off featuring his President Camacho character, initially conceived as a web series. A week before the 2012 elections, he reprised the character in a series of shorts for website Funny or Die. In June 2016, before the presidential election in November, ''Rolling Stone'' published an article stating that Judge and Cohen would produce ''Idiocracy'' themed campaign advertisements opposing Donald Trump's presidential campaign if given permission from Fox to do so. In July 2016, Crews told ''Business Insider'' that the ads would not go forward as planned, but that they would have featured Camacho wrestling in a cage match against the various candidates.

See also

* Kakistocracy
* Dysgenics
* "The Marching Morons"

References

External links

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Scenes from the film
at the Fox Home Entertainment YouTube channel.

{{Mike Judge

2006 films
2000s science fiction comedy films
American science fiction comedy films
American satirical films
2000s English-language films
Films directed by Mike Judge
Cryonics in fiction
American dystopian films
2000s dystopian films
Films about fictional presidents of the United States
Films set in 2005
Films set in the 26th century
Films shot in Austin, Texas
20th Century Fox films
Films about television
Films set in Washington, D.C.
Films set in the White House
Films with screenplays by Etan Cohen
Films with screenplays by Mike Judge
Films scored by Theodore Shapiro
2006 comedy films
2000s political comedy films
Films about intellectual disability
2000s American films