Idiocracy

Idiocracy (Mike Judge, 2006) The concept here is such an ingenious variation of the Planet of the Apes concept, that one wishes it were a better film.

 

An absolutely average Army recruit (Luke Wilson) is selected to participate in a cryogenics experiment (along with an average intelligence prostitute—played by Maya Rudolph

—as apparently there are no average women in the military?). Then, due to hierarchical mismanagement the program is abandoned and forgotten until the year 2505. During the course of 500 years, the process of natural selection reaches the conclusion of its "survival of the fittest" mode and sails right on past it with dire consequences. Higher IQ couples have been slow to reproduce (if they do at all), and are soon outrun in population by the lower IQ populace, who are always ready to procreate (whatever the hell THAT means) at the drop of a beer can. Or when the bar closes.

When circumstances are such that Wilson's recruit is finally awakened, he finds himself on a planet of morons, self-obsessed and ADD, the world is a corpochracy (clothing is made up of logo patches), dysfunctional, and appallingly apathetic.  He struggles through the legal and penal system (one dimly Kafkaesque, and the other startlingly easy to circumvent) to finally emerge as President of the United States...because he's the smartest guy in the country.

As right on as the satire is here, it doesn't take it to its cynical conclusion, which—if one is cynical enough already—one can see happening before one's very eyes.

 

I would be ecstatically happy if I thought that would really happen—that people would vote for the smartest guy. But I've been through enough election cycles to know that people (whatever their intelligence) are not most likely to vote for the best and the brightest—they would probably resent the more intelligent candidate, voting against them. People don't vote for seeming intelligence or competence, they vote for likability—they want someone "they can have a beer with" or "who talk like I wanna talk." God help us.

On top of that, the inherent cynicism of the concept, brilliant though it is, has no follow-through, and is merely circumvented to reach an end-point. That, and the cheesiness of the production-design (which I could actually buy given a corporate mentality and an apathetic consumer-society) work against the film, which starts out so promisingly, and has flashes of ingenuity throughout. I just wish it might have gone farther, and opted for a less easy way out.

 

Still, every few years it would be good to look at the film just to see what new similarity has become a reality.