However, the Old French term of “idiote” (“uneducated or ignorant person”) is what we based the modern English word “idiot” on, so our movie today will not only be a study of “a government ruling ignorant persons” but it’s also the product of Aristotle banging a French whore and not using the Latin birth control method known as “super duco Foris”. We just call it “pulling out”….

All language crap not withstanding, Idiocracy is the latest movie from writer/director/producer Mike Judge. This time the man responsible for lampooning cubicle jockies in Office Space, ignorant Texas rednecks with “King of the Hill” and the stupidity of ‘90s youth and pop culture with “Beavis & Butthead” takes a stab at stupidity and ignorance as a whole with Idiocracy, starring Luke Wilson (he’s the one without the nose shaped like a dog shit), Maya Rudolph (the cute freckled chick from “Saturday Night Live” who always plays Whitney Houston) and Dax Shepard (the three people who saw Employee of the Month and the eight people who saw Without A Paddle will recognize him…) .

The movie’s opening segment is a funny-yet-chilling eye-opener to the current state of US population growth. On the one hand we have an educated well-to-do couple who put off having children because they want to establish their life and finances first to make sure they’re capable of raising offspring, and because they also feel that the world’s not exactly “the best place right now to raise a child”. This is further postponed by the husband’s lazy sperm later on in life, followed by his eventual death and the wife’s menopause. In other words, two perfectly good sets of genes shot straight into the shitter and forever lost to society. Meanwhile, the other case study follows Clevon, who fits every ignorant white trash stereotype you can find. He’s uneducated, a bigot, spreads his fermented seed to any and every piece of hillbilly hooch he can get, thus breeding an entire generation of Clevon sequels. The man (and I use the term loosely) generally deserves no better than to have his legs blown off with a land mine and this arms slowly severed at the elbows with a length of rusty razor wire before he’s buried up to his neck in the center of a colony of fire ants, which will agonizingly chew away at his face, bloody stumps and genitals until he finally succumbs to sweet sweet oblivion… before getting re-animated Herbert West style so he can live through it all again and again and again.

The opening sequence also appears to be somewhat tagged on as a way of explaining why the movie’s future turns out the way it does… I guess the creators’ (or the studio’s) faith in their audience isn’t exactly total. Either way, our story itself is about Joe Bauer and Rita (last name withheld due to lack of interest I guess). Joe is the most disgustingly average guy employed under Uncle Sam and sits around watching reality police shows behind his desk in a military file storage room all day. Rita is a prostitute. The two are selected for an army experiment in which they’re to be sealed up in prototype cryogenics sarcophagi and thawed out after a year. Of course things go wrong and the man in charge of the project is arrested for his involvement with Rita’s pimp and a prostitution ring, so the base is closed down and Joe and Rita’s containment units are dumped and forgotten about. Since neither one was anything but forgettable and neither had any friends or family to be concerned about their absence, the two remained in their frozen state (despite the fact that there’s been no power source for either to remain active on…) until 2505, when an avalanche in a massive garbage dump frees their hi-tech tombs and they’re let loose in this new and horrifying world populated entirely by a nation of Clevons.

Yes, stupidity and testosterone have raged uncontrollably for 5 centuries as the educated spent way too much time on pharmaceuticals to fix baldness and erectile dysfunction (two things that Chuck Darwin would classify as elements meant to halt the progression of those particular genes…) and not enough time on trying to propagate the evolution of the species. Starbucks, H&R Block and other established businesses have been reduced to franchised whore houses. Carl’s Jr. sponsors the government. Every stitch of clothing bears numerous logos, turning every human being into ad space. Water has been outlawed everywhere but in toilets and has been replaced by sports drinks as the keystone to existence. The news is hosted by barely-dressed macho men and lingerie models. Public executions are held every Monday night and glamorized in The Running Man style game show fashion. The president is a former professional wrestler and porn "superstar" named Dwayne Alezando Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. The highest rated show on television is “Ow, My Balls!” and consists of a man whose testicles are assaulted in different ways for 30 minutes. The apex of cinema is a movie called Ass and consists of a person’s pale and frightening butt splayed across a screen for 90 minutes and occasionally farting. As our narrator tells us, “It won 9 Oscars, including best screenplay”. You’re either ready to vomit at the possibility of this future or praying for an affordable method of time travel to be built soon so you yourself can live there. Or, you can be like me and feel disturbed that you’re not sure which side of the argument you stand on. I gotta admit, franchised prostitution and televised executions are tempting…

Will Joe and Rita be able to make it back to their own time via the CostCo. “Time Masheen”? If not, will they be able to survive in this dystopia Planet of the ‘Tards? Or, perhaps, will they even go so far as to use their big formerly-average brains to the benefit of putting these jerk-offs and numb nuts back on the fast track of distancing themselves from their tick eating, banana peeling, crap flinging primate ancestors? What part will monster trucks with death dealing phalluses called “Ass Blaster” and “The Dildozer” play in all of it? Well, for those answers you’ll have to rent it. I’m trying to stay away from the whole “spoiler” thing, at least for movies less than 5 years old.

The basic plot of the movie has been done a thousand times before. I can no longer on my fingers and toes the number of “wacky futures” I’ve been subjected to over the years and I’m still (barely) in my 20s, nor can I fathom the number of times the “fish out of water” premise has been affixed to the synopsis of a movie. “Hey look, it’s a person who’s used to one environment being introduced to a completely different environment! Let’s watch as the zany antics ensue in this recipe for wackiness! That’s just kooky!” Argh…

As far as the idea of the movie goes, I thought Judge’s fellow animation god Matt Groening and partner David Cohen pulled it all together much better with “Futurama”. However, my entire comparison collapses under it’s own fat ass when you realize that, whereas “Futurama” is a parody of science fiction, Idiocracy is still a social commentary of the steep down sloping of the general population’s intelligence, so they’re two entirely different entities that just happen to take place in similar settings. This does make me wish though that Judge could’ve put the same concept to work in a different setting so as not to draw the obvious comparisons nor annoy me by trying to put an “ironic” new spin on the same old jokes. I’d actually like to think that he originally approached the people at Fox with another setting for the movie and who then, after gangbanging Paula Abdul and doing speedballs with Kiefer Sutherland, made the “creative suggestion” that Judge place his movie in the future because it’ll give their “Futurama” audience something to watch during their candlelit vigil waiting for those new episodes to materialize. Meh.

The acting was nothing great. Wilson’s well cast as the inanely average hero, Rudolph actually seems miscast as a prostitute (she always seems to be too sweet and plain to pull of whorish and ghetto), Shepard seems to be channeling Michael Richards circa UHF, and everyone else just kinda stands around and shouts dialogue that doesn’t seem so much written as it was transcribed from recordings of frat parties at Texas A&M, only with all the racial slurs taken out. That’s actually the funniest part of this whole scenario now that I think about it. Despite the ignorant people on which this movie is based being stereotyped as racist dick bags, we don’t witness a single act of racism in the entire movie. In fact, President Comacho is big black dude! Granted, he’s one of the few African-Americans we see through the entire hour-and-a-half, but he’s still the highest hog in the country! If racism is bred from ignorance and hatred, then how is it that it’s completely left out of a social commentary about the rule of stupidity in a derelict future?! I’m sure I know the answer: political correctness. People calling other people “fags” and abusing and oppressing them for being smarter than they are is fine, but once you start poking at the racial and religious differences in people, unless it’s coming out of Chris Rock or Margaret Cho’s mouth you better start running for the hill! Oye.

If anyone knows of an article or interview in which Mike Judge discusses how much the final product matches up with his original concept, please let me know. I’m curious to see how much of this was left out by his accord and how much was the result of studio based neutering.

Finally, though I would say that this movie terrifies me and makes me want to go out and start procreating with as many intelligent independent women as I can possibly find, the race for control of the population has hit a few profound forks in recent years and thus dulled the impact of the movie. Though I initially hated the concept of the War for Oil, after seeing this movie I realize that it’s actually serving as a thinning of ranks for all the Clevon Juniors of the country who are too hopped up on living out their Rambo fantasies in the Middle East to be over here birthing a generation of dipshits and skankoids! Besides, by the time my kids are old enough to get a job and buy their first sexual experience, the illegal immigrants will have taken over and anyone not speaking Spanish will be scrubbing toilets and dying from hyper-Diabetes as a result of a diet consisting of nothing but microwave Chimichangas and that piss-in-a-bottle people call Corona. Hopefully I’ll be kissing the great here-after through the lips of sweet lady Smith & Wesson before that happens though, cuz I didn’t learn a friggin’ thing in those three years of Spanish class and I’m too damn old to learn anything new at this point…