wrighters.net

As a huge fan of Office Space, I really was excited when I heard heard about Idiocracy a few months ago, but when I heard it wasn’t a sequel, I didn’t go out and get it right away, but I finally got around to putting it in the NetFlix queue. Unfortunately, I forgot about it, and on a whim went ahead and rented it and forgot to remove it from the queue and it showed up, so I payed twice for it. I don’t know if it was worth two rentals.

The basic idea is that one man and one woman (Luke Wilson as a soldier and Maya Rudolph as a prostitute) are selected to participate in an army experiment where people could be put in a state of hibernation. The man running the experiment gets busted for pimpin’, and the subjects are forgotten about and wake up 500 years in the future. Since the smartest people in society stop reproducing and all the idiots procreate like rabbits, the world is full of complete morons. Everything is sponsored by a company, there is trash everywhere, and the English language is a mixture of rap and hillbilly. It turns out that an average joe from 500 years ago is now the smartest man on the planet. The president is a wrestling (as in WWE) superstar, and the crops are dying because they are being watered with the equivalent of Gatorade. Society needs to be rescued, but you wonder how they survived as long as they did.

The jokes get a little old and are pretty crude, the language is a little foul, and it’s not nearly as funny as Office Space, but overall it’s a pretty good idea. I think I laughed more than I have in a while, and it was great to see a lot of the same actors from Office Space. Milton is there, and Michael Bolton, but the main actors are different. It also makes you think a bit about where we are actually headed with all the crazy marketing messages we get every day. It seems far-fetched, but watch a little TV after the movie, and you’ll begin to wonder how far from the truth it really is.