Eye Candy #258 - "Idiocracy"

Idiocracy:  I appreciate good satire as much as the next person. I also appreciate some subtlety with my wit, because frankly, if you have to dumb down the satire for your audience to get it, you are either a.) seriously underestimating your audience’s ability to comprehend your message; or b.) your message isn’t that strong to begin with. In 2005, a soldier, Joe (Luke Wilson), and a hooker, Rita (Maya Rudolph) are selected to participate in an experimental military freezing/hibernation program that goes awry. When they finally do awaken, they are 500 years in the future, surrounded by morons who can’t grow plants, who only drink sports drinks, who watch mindless reality TV shows, because stupid people inevitably reproduce more frequently than smart people. The movie follows Joe’s various unintended run-ins with that society for the bulk of this film’s 84 minutes. Directed by Mike Judge, this film left me cold. I didn’t find it very funny. Compare “Office Space” (a satire of cube rat work places) versus “Idiocracy” (a satire of consumption and stupid people breeding), where one has some outlandish aspects but still maintains a veneer of reality that makes it even funnier because we can relate to it, while the other film is over-the-top to the point where you can’t relate to it in anyway which makes it hard to care about any character involved. They are fake people in a fake world reacting to fake circumstances that seem about as deep as pro wrestling. Seriously, they were put in a hibernation program by a pimp and a general who was shortly canned for setting up his own prostitution ring – they didn’t go from smart to dumb, they went from dumb to dumb. That’s not a journey, that’s static. Woodchuck sez, “Not my cup of tea.”