Idiocracy [DVD]

I took to this film immediately. I saw the opening scenes at work where it was being transmitted on one of our film channels. I would love to see a UK adaptation of this film, or something along the same lines, as the basic premise is somewhat topical in the UK at the moment.

I come from a relatively poor background (grew up in Teesside during the 1980s) but was fortunate enough to get some higher education back when it was still free and I have worked for a living ever since. I was well into my thirties before I started fathering children and we're sticking at two. I resent being labelled middle-class because I still work unsociable hours and long shifts and I have to do constant overtime just to make ends meet.
In contrast, and in far greater numbers, much younger people with little or no education who are getting off their faces and knocked-up frequently enough on cheaply-built, miserable, high-density housing estates have found their lifestyles to be curiously rewarding as the current welfare regulations provide more money and bigger housing for young, expanding unemployed families who haven't lifted a finger outside their own homes since they left school. I don't resent them, I almost envy them! Get away with it while you still can!

It's called dysgenics. Look it up. It's a regressive kind of evolution, survival of the dumbest. Slackers, thugs and pram-faces who have found that they can have babies for a living and are, in their expanding numbers, hugely influential as consumers in determining what sort of ignorant, proletarian bibble gets printed en-masse in the red-top tabloids, England football flags in every window of every TWOC'ed car and smelly council flat, and they seem to be vastly outnumbering educated professionals. I see childish spelling errors EVERYWHERE! Not just in supermarkets and newspaper adverts but in recruitment agency windows! A racist chav who appears on Big Brother and dies of cancer is sainted in the media and practically canonised by her peers because... what? She had babies? She had cancer?

Idiocracy! We are so close now it is not even funny. Now more than ever, for so many reasons, we need scientists and teachers and other high-grade professionals to find a path through the troubles ahead and give us a prosperous future but the goverments keep cutting funding for education and schools keep lowering the standards for GCSE grades. What for? Why can't we face the truth? (I recently met one of the most vacant, air-headed 17-year-olds I have ever known and her GCSE results were twice as good as mine were in 1989... yet she appears lack even the most common knowledge about the subjects she studied let alone anything else!)

The Big Society is getting stupider and stupider and this film is less of a comedy and more of a warning of things to come! I just wish that instead of framing the premise around a standard feel-good Hollywood film with a standard happy ending that Mike Judge could have spent more time laying into the issue. This would have made a good mockumentary, but of course it would never have got the backing.

Love it anyway... at least somebody is saying what most of us are too polite to voice.

Idiocracy starts with a preface, it tells how the process of social advancement has been stunted due to social trends seeing a shift in what is seen as desirable - dumbing down of society has seen ambition watered down - glamour and celebrity has replaced intelligence and ingenuity. Society is getting stupid. When an experiment to freeze two humans for a year goes slightly awry due to a mishap - the two 'volunteers' find themselves 500 years in the future, the compounded effect of mediocrity means they are the two most intelligent people on Earth - or America at least.

This is a film with a message which seems ever more relevant. With an increasing amount of entertainment focussing on cheap, unchallenging creations designed to appeal to the largest common denominator and with less people interested in current affairs - this is a comic warning of what could be if we continue to shun that which is stimulating in favour of bland mediocrity. There's some great humour here and it ranges from the silly slapstick of TV programme "Ow, my balls!" to clever parodies of environmental or political issues. The potential for this to be one of the great social satires is there, but the goofball aspects sometimes dominate a bit too much. In 2005 Fox famously gave up on this film and you can't help but get the impression that with a bit more support and energy behind it, that Idiocracy could have been one of the strongest films of the year. It's a shame that this movie has blended into anonymity because it has something to say, and it says it with a cheeky smile - in some ways it fell victim to the safe mainstream-ism that it warns against. It's probably also guilty of not being quite as gutsy as it could have been, it could have been a bit more savage with its portrayal of homogenised society and not played it quite so safe.

The film itself goes on for around 80 minutes but don't expect any DVD extras to bulk out any free viewing time because other than a few deleted scenes there's no other bonus features. There's no Blu-Ray release of Idiocracy yet but that's no surprise considering that the film only had a restricted release in the first place. Luke Wilson manages to convince as the 'average' man who finds himself at the pinnacle of human intelligence and Dax Shepard provides plenty of laughs as the moronic future-man, the rest of the cast are okay but never fully utilised.

In a nutshell: Mike Judge's acute observations are used to distil much of what is wrong with the world and create a whole future from it. Idiocracy is a fun, light-hearted satire which is more intelligent and allegorical than it gets credit for, but the potential was there for it to have been more scathing - it's funny, but it's also a missed opportunity.

This is the best film I've seen in a long time, and it's surely destined for cult status.

It presents a view of the future which is totally opposite from the conventional hi-tech Utopian vision. The world's population consists entirely of puerile idiots who haven't a clue about anything. The attention to detail in the way the moronic goings-on are depicted is quite incredible - kind of reminded me of the Fifth Element in some respects.

The cinematography is also rather beautiful in a melancholic way, even though the world it's portraying is poisonous, artificial and utterly unwholesome. The "garbage avalanche" scene is awesome.

Highly recommended. I rented this at the weekend and have had to purchase it immediately - I can see myself watching this over and over.