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, and Dax Shepard, it follows an American soldier who takes part in a classified hibernation experiment, only to be accidentally frozen for too long and awaken 500 years later in a dystopian world where commercialism has run rampant, mankind has embraced anti-intellectualism, and society is devoid of such traits as intellectual curiosity, social responsibility, justice, and human rights.

Not to be confused with Ideocracy.

Idiocracy
Theatrical release poster
Directed byMike Judge
Produced by
Screenplay by
Story byMike Judge
Starring
Music byTheodore Shapiro
CinematographyTim Suhrstedt
Edited byDavid Rennie
Production
company
Ternion
Distributed by20th Century Fox
Release date
  • September 1, 2006 (2006-09-01)
Running time
84 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$2–4 million
Box office$495,303[1]

The film was not screened for critics and distributor 20th Century Fox was accused of abandoning the film. 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 become a cult film.[2]

Plot

In 2005, U.S. Army librarian Corporal Joe Bauers is selected for a suspended animation experiment due to being the "most average" individual in the entire armed forces. Lacking a suitable female candidate from the military, they hire a prostitute named Rita whose pimp Upgrayedd had been bribed to allow her to take part. When the officer in charge is arrested for having started his own prostitution ring under Upgrayedd's tutelage, the experiment is forgotten about. Over the next five centuries, the expectations of society lead the most intelligent humans to choose not to have children while the least intelligent reproduce indiscriminately, creating generations that become increasingly dumber and more virile with each passing century. In 2505, Joe and Rita's suspension chambers are unearthed by the collapse of a mountain-sized garbage pile; Joe's suspension chamber crashes into the apartment of Frito Pendejo, who ejects him.

What was once Washington, D.C. has lost most of its infrastructure, with people living in plastic huts called "domistiles". The human population has become morbidly stupid, speaking only low registers of English competently, and is profoundly anti-intellectual with individuals being named after corporate products. Suspecting hallucination, Joe enters a hospital, where he is incompetently diagnosed and comes to realize what has happened to him and society. He is arrested for not having a bar code tattoo to pay for his doctor's appointment, and is sent to prison after being assigned the grossly incompetent Frito as his lawyer. Meanwhile, Rita escapes from her chamber and aims to resume working as a prostitute, but soon realizes that people have become so stupid that she can charge customers money without doing anything for them.

Joe is renamed "Not Sure" by a faulty speech-recognition tattooing machine. He takes an IQ test and then tricks a guard by telling him that he was in the wrong line, and should be getting out of prison instead of coming in. He escapes by simply walking out the door while the guard is checking his prisoner exit records. Once free, Joe finds Frito and asks him whether a time machine exists to return him to 2005, bribing Frito with promises of riches through compound interest on a bank account Joe will open in the 21st century. While leading Joe and Rita to the time machine, Frito takes them into a gigantic Costco store, where a tattoo scanner identifies Joe. He is apprehended but is surprised when he is taken to the White House, where he is appointed Secretary of the Interior on the grounds that his IQ test identified him as the most intelligent person alive.

President Camacho gives Joe 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 a sports drink called Brawndo, whose parent corporation purchased the FDA, FCC, and USDA. When Joe has the drink replaced with water, Brawndo's stock drops to zero and half of the population lose their jobs, causing mass riots. Joe is sentenced to die in a monster truck demolition derby featuring the undefeated "rehabilitation officer" Beef Supreme. However, Beef's derby vehicle is too large to enter the arena and is crushed under the collapsing pillars and ceiling.

Frito and Rita discover that Joe's reintroduction of water to the soil has prompted vegetation to grow in the fields. During the televised event, they arrange for the sprouting crops to be shown on the stadium's display screen, and Camacho gives Joe a presidential pardon. Joe and Rita decide to stay in the future, though they soon discover they had no choice as the "time masheen" Frito mentioned is merely an extremely inaccurate history-themed amusement ride. Following Camacho's term as president, Joe is elected. He marries Rita and they conceive the world's three smartest children, while new Vice President Frito takes eight wives and fathers 32 of the world's stupidest children. In a post-credits scene, Upgrayedd awakens from his own suspension chamber and sets off in search of Rita, just as she had predicted earlier.

Cast

Themes

The idea of a dystopian society based on dysgenics is not new. H. G. Wells' The Time Machine postulates a devolved society of humans, as does the short story "The Marching Morons" by Cyril M. Kornbluth, akin to the "Epsilon-minus Semi-Morons" of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.[5][6]

Production

Early working titles included The United States of Uhh-merica and 3001.[7] Filming took place in 2004 on several stages at Austin Studios[8][9] and in the Texas cities of Austin, San Marcos, Pflugerville, and Round Rock.[10] 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.[11]

Release

Idiocracy's original release date was August 5, 2005, according to Mike Judge.[12] In April 2006, a release date was set for September 1, 2006. In August, numerous articles[13] 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),[9] and expanded to only 130 theaters,[14] not the usual wide release of 600 or more theaters.[15] According to the Austin American-Statesman, 20th Century Fox, the film's distributor, was entirely absent in promoting the feature;[9] while posters were released to theaters, "no movie trailers, no ads, and only two stills",[16] and no press kits were released.[17]

The film was not screened for critics.[18] 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.[14] That speculation was followed by open criticism of the studio's lack of support from Ain't It Cool News, Time, and Esquire.[19][20][21] 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."[20]

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.[22] 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' [delivered 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".[23]

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.[24] 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.[24]

Box office

Film Release date Box office revenue Box office ranking Budget Reference
United States United States International Worldwide All time United States All time worldwide
Idiocracy September 1, 2006 $444,093 $51,210 $495,303 #6,914 Unknown Unknown [1]

Box office receipts totaled $444,093 in the U.S., with the widest release being 135 theaters.[25]

Reception

Although it was not screened in advance for critics, Idiocracy received positive reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a score of 76%, with an average rating of 6.41/10, based on 49 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."[26] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 66 out of 100, based on reviews from 12 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[27]

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."[28] In an Entertainment Weekly review only 87 words long,[14] 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."[29] 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."[18]

The film was also well received in other countries. John Patterson, critic for UK newspaper 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."[30] Brazilian news magazine Veja called the film "politically incorrect", recommended that readers see the DVD, and wrote "the film went flying through [American] theaters and did not open in Brazil. Proof that the future contemplated by Judge is not that far away."[31]

Critic Alexandre Koball of the Brazilian website CinePlayers.com, while giving the movie a score of 5/5 along with 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."[32]

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.[33]

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 presidential primaries, writer Etan Cohen[34] and others expressed opinions that the film's predictions were converging on accuracy,[35][36][37] which, during the general election, director Mike Judge also said.[38] At the time, Judge also compared Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump—who later won and became President of the United States—to the film's dim-witted wrestler-turned-president, Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.[38] When asked about predicting the future, he remarked, "I'm no prophet, I was off by 490 years."[39]

Comparisons have been made between the film and Trump's presidency.[40][41][42] 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.[43] Internet memes have spawned comparing Trump to the film.[44][45][46][47]

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."[48]

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.[49] 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.[50] 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.[51]

gollark: Logistics Pipes would be acceptable.
gollark: It's annoying because it has nothing like an import bus or subnet ridiculousness.
gollark: It's boring and sounds worse.
gollark: Okay, so there might be difficulties in running cables really long distances, but we did it with fibre-optic lines and there are always the quantum rings.
gollark: And the autocrafting solver's pretty good.

References
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  3. @sararueforreal (April 30, 2015). "#TBT a picture from #Idiocracy "IT'S GOT ELECTROLYTES"" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  4. "Sara Rue as Jo on All for Love". Hallmark Channel. Archived from the original on October 10, 2018. Retrieved October 10, 2018.
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