Idiocracy

Idiocracy

Dir: Mike Judge

Starring: Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph

About a year ago, the chances of this film seeing the light of day were very bleak.

After a year of post-production limbo, Idiocracy was eventually released in the US in September last year.

20^th Century Fox were under a contractual obligation to give the film a cinematic release before it came out on DVD. After test screenings they decided to show it in only 125 cinemas, do nothing to promote the movie, and refused to screen it to critics.

On this side of the pond, the film has only just been released on DVD and never played in the cinema.

None of it good news, you might think, given that the vast majority of straight-to-video films are terribly poor.

Well, rumours circulating around the internet suggest otherwise.

Both the New York Times and the Guardian have implied that Fox stamped on the film because of its radical slant and anti-corporate message. Edward Havens of FilmJerk.com called the stifling of Idiocracy’s release “one of the most egregious travesties of modern cinema.”

There are good reasons to be suspicious. Despite its glossy production, Idiocracy contains some savage attacks on consumerism, modern American culture and the dumbing down of politics.

Army librarian Joe Bauers is picked by the military to participate in a cryogenic experiment, primarily due to the fact that he is a totally average human being.

Although the plan is to wake him after a year, he ends up returning to consciousness 500 years late, in a society so dumbed down he is easily the most intelligent person alive.

Court cases are turned into glossy Pop Idol television extravaganzas, complete with celebrity judges and flashy corporate advertising. The President is a porn star and five time Ultimate Smack Down champion. Starbucks offers hand-jobs with its cappuccinos.

Bauers is recruited to the White House to fix the world’s problems. He begins by convincing the President to water crops with water, instead of a pop drink called Brandos.

Mike Judge’s best known work, Beavis and Butthead, contained many implied criticisms of American culture. They pale in comparison, though, to the bravery and perceptiveness displayed here.

Fox News, for instance, is portrayed horribly, despite being owned by the same man as the film’s distributor: Rupert Murdoch.

Idiocracy is a comedy, sometimes of the gross-out, high school variety. But it has a strange tone to its laughs, and a savage wit to its politics.

There are few laugh-out-loud moments here, but the jokes that hit have a reassuring intelligence to them and simmer in the brain longer than they have any right to be there.

It is far from a perfect film. Several moments fall flat, and it occasionally seems more of a pastiche of humorous sketches than a coherent narrative.

But these deficits are comfortably made up for by the indignant cleverness of the script and the impressively radical plot.

There’s good reason to think Fox tried to stop you watching this film. Don’t let them.

Warts and all, you probably haven’t seen anything quite like it.