The Idiocracy - Movie Review Example

IDIOCRACY The premise of Mike Judge's film Idiocracy is that uneducated and foolish people are out-breeding educated and intelligent people. Although the reason for this is not explored, the idea is that natural selection does not care about intelligence, it only cares about reproduction; the result is that idiots have taken over the world of the future. This is not exactly true about natural selection, but it is a funny idea. The idea behind the movie is that society is becoming dumber. Movies and cultural products are becoming more idiotic, people are eating more fast food and living more unhealthy lifestyles.

Convenience and luxury are breeding a class of foolish and soft people. The film explores the idea of what the logical result of the current situation would be. Two characters wake up in the future where the world is populated exclusively with trashy, dumb people. This is a funny and interesting idea. The movie is a success. But the premise about natural selection is not entirely correct. Intelligence is taken into account by evolutionary processes. Clearly the fact that the idiots of the future don't know how to organize themselves and are killing all their crops suggests that they will not survive very long.

Also the fact that the Luke Wilson character becomes president and gets ahead in life because of his intelligence suggests that society at large values brains. Against his will, the Luke Wilson character is succeeding in life. His children will have many more opportunities than he does, and more than any of Dax's children. However, the premise feeds into our insecurity about the state of the world and a general feeling that things are going downhill. People have believed this since the beginning of time.

This movie was probably shown because in it there is a connection between humour and thoughtfulness. Ideas are present along with the silly gags. This is a good way to illustrate that some comedy can be a social commentary on the way we live now. Mike Judge is a smart comedian who often make films that suggest society is empty or full of cultural waste. In this movie he is trying to show that the world is on the edge of a cliff and in the future will fall off of that cliff. But the whole time he makes us laugh.

That makes the medicine go down much more easily. In the end this movie does not really have a profound message. The idea that the world is going to be full of idiots five hundred years from now because of breeding practices is unlikely. There may be a lot of dumb people in the world today, but there are a lot of smart people. There will always be a place and a need for intelligence. Indeed, in the movie itself, Judge shows how intelligence is actually valued by the idiots. Perhaps intelligent people will be a smaller set of the population, but it is unlikely they will disappear entirely in the future.

The movie is intended to be a comedy with an edge and that is what it is, nothing more.