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.