Every once in a while, a really smart movie comes along that shows you just how stupid modern society is by shoving it in your face. "Idiocracy" is precisely such a film. Filled with purposeful profanity (it actually drives the storyline) and brilliant parody, Idiocracy manages to cough up nearly 90 minutes of hilarious commentary on just how stupid modern society has become today.
The storyline is simple: A career military desk jockey of average intelligence is cocooned in an experimental hibernation machine for 500 years. (By accident, of course. It's the military we're talking about here.) When he awakens, he finds himself in a world populated and run by complete idiots -- the result of 500 years of reverse natural selection, where the stupid people fornicate the most, and the smart people stop having children. (Sound familiar, anyone?) The result of it all? A tabloid quality, corporate-controlled world of idiot consumers whose thought processes are limited to the three-word phrases pounded into their heads by relentless advertising campaigns. Phrases like, "Money is good" or "Plants need electrolytes."
What's so great about Idiocracy is not merely how funny it is, but rather how accurate it is at constructing a future society extrapolated from the real trends of modern-day America. Today, for example, corporations have taken over control of the Food and Drug Administration. In Idiocracy, a sports drink company simply BUYS the FDA and replaced the entire Food Guide Pyramid with sports drink ads.
Water is no longer consumed at all in the Idiocracy world -- consumers have been taught that water is only for toilets -- and sports drink liquid is used to water the crops (which are mysteriously dying). This is much like modern medicine today, where doctors, sunscreen manufacturers and even the American Cancer Society insists that sunlight is bad for your health, and that what you really need are expensive prescription medications to solve your health problems. Or they think that "Restless Legs Syndrome" is some mysterious musculo-chemical disorder rather than simply a deficiency in dietary magnesium.
The storyline is simple: A career military desk jockey of average intelligence is cocooned in an experimental hibernation machine for 500 years. (By accident, of course. It's the military we're talking about here.) When he awakens, he finds himself in a world populated and run by complete idiots -- the result of 500 years of reverse natural selection, where the stupid people fornicate the most, and the smart people stop having children. (Sound familiar, anyone?) The result of it all? A tabloid quality, corporate-controlled world of idiot consumers whose thought processes are limited to the three-word phrases pounded into their heads by relentless advertising campaigns. Phrases like, "Money is good" or "Plants need electrolytes."
What's so great about Idiocracy is not merely how funny it is, but rather how accurate it is at constructing a future society extrapolated from the real trends of modern-day America. Today, for example, corporations have taken over control of the Food and Drug Administration. In Idiocracy, a sports drink company simply BUYS the FDA and replaced the entire Food Guide Pyramid with sports drink ads.
Water is no longer consumed at all in the Idiocracy world -- consumers have been taught that water is only for toilets -- and sports drink liquid is used to water the crops (which are mysteriously dying). This is much like modern medicine today, where doctors, sunscreen manufacturers and even the American Cancer Society insists that sunlight is bad for your health, and that what you really need are expensive prescription medications to solve your health problems. Or they think that "Restless Legs Syndrome" is some mysterious musculo-chemical disorder rather than simply a deficiency in dietary magnesium.
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