“Idiocracy”: Truth? Justice? Absolutely no way.

There’s no corporate manoeuvre from the last year more depressing than that given by 20th Century Fox to Mike Judge’s future-imperfect comedy Idiocracy.

Fox has had the complete film for years – the copyright date in the end credits is 2005, and principal photography was actually 2003/4 – but has consistently refused to release it, eventually relenting late last year and allowing it to be seen on 150 screens in the US with no promotion whatsoever, simply to fulfil the contract demanding a cinematic release. Apparently they blame this on poor focus groups, this from the studio that gave us without comment Big Momma’s House 2, and nothing whatsoever to do with the corporate criticism (including of Fox News itself) contained within. There has been no foreign release, although there is a suggestion on IMDB’s UK website that it’s going to go straight to DVD. You can currently buy the Region 1 release through it.

This film is just too good for that. Curious about it from the stories I’d seen from the States, and with no way I could have seen it legally, I discovered it on a “certain” website and decided to give it a go. The version “out there” appears to be sourced from the Region 1 DVD, which I’d highly recommend buying. I’m certainly going to; DVD buying brought back Family Guy, is about to bring back Futurama, and made Judge’s previous Office Space (also badly treated theatrically) into a cult classic. The fact that these are all Fox produced shows… well, something.

Review follows (with MILD SPOILER WARNING) after the break.

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Idiocracy (2005/2006) – d. Mike Judge/w. Mike Judge, Etan Cohen – dist. 20th Century Fox

Idiocracy is about a completely average in every way Army librarian (played as well as can be expected by Luke Wilson) who’s been selected for a special and top-secret experiment in cryogenic freezing. A snafu leads to the experiment being forgotten, and five hundred years later he is awoken into a very unbrave, corporatised, thick new world of McDonalds-style tills at the local hospital, very direct billboard advertising, hyper-inflation, mountains of landfill, a Judge Judy-style court system, a pro-wrestler as President and where the most popular programme on TV is entitled “Ow, My Balls!“.

So not exactly a subtle concept, then, but it works partly because of that. Mike Judge has, for a long time, expertly chronicled the downfall of pop culture through making TV shows that quietly subvert it, that appear to be examples of dumbing down on the front but turn out to be much more intelligent underneath. Beavis and Butthead, for example, was taken by many as an example of the idiocy of MTV culture where, in fact, that was exactly the point of the show. Office Space works, oddly enough because while it gave the world the phrase “pound-me-in-the-ass prison” it also was a skewed look at subverting the corporate machine from within that praised its subversion, at least to the third act of the movie.

The thing is that, like Beavis, Idiocracy only does subtle in the detail – this is a visually rich film that obviously cost a lot of digital FX money to create towers of trash, gladiatorial arenas, Third World Costcos and ass jokes. This doesn’t quite gel somehow with the concept, and a possible answer is that it’s just not plausible enough. The world just cannot get that dumbed down – it’s not humanly possible. Matt Groening’s brilliant Futurama, whilst very different in style and treatment to Idiocracy, shares some basic themes about the averageness of humanity; however, in Futurama, the average continues to rule whilst in Idiocracy the average plummets to imbecilic. Futurama‘s world, in which humanity keeps on saving itself from long-revealed catastrophes by finding an ingenious way of covering its ass for a few more years, seems much more plausible than Judge’s, no matter how hard he tries. It’s just too outrageous and unbelievable.

Nevertheless there is one saving grace to Idiocracy. It’s very funny – the sequences involving the slightly corrupted army chief have already entered the Mike Judge one-liner lexicon, the arm-imprint machine is the PC LOAD LETTER for 2505, and some of the small details and commercial parodies are simply inspired.

And a film this funny can definitely atone for its meandering, deliberately over the top plotline; in fact, its meandering nature may well be one of the very few possible ways of showing off as much of the world as possible within a surprisingly short eighty-four minute running time. The film has obviously been edited with a hacksaw and some of the sequences that might have fleshed out the world are probably stuck on Mike Judge’s Avid, and will probably stay there forever; it’s a real shame.

The explanation for the treatment of the film theatrically may come down, in the end, to the way it goes off at certain corporate entities. Carl’s Jr, an American fast food chain, apparently threatened to sue Fox over the way it’s portrayed; as an establishment with “big ass fries” whose catchphrase is “fuck you, I’m eating!“, and which sponsors government officials. Starbucks now offers “lattes” in the same way that certain places offer a “massage”. There’s a subplot involving a energy drink maker that before things went completely to hell managed to inviegle its way into all forms of society, of which the main character comments more than once that it “tastes like Gatorade”; Gatorade is a Coke brand name and Coke are notoriously protective of their brands.

In particular, however, it has a go at Fox News Channel, the take on which reminds me of the worst excesses of L!ve TV, and Fox News is Murdoch’s holy cow. The Simpsons could get away with spoofing FNC because The Simpsons makes Fox an awful lot of money, but a small film like this would have had approximately zero chance. One would suspect that it is this sequence that really got it canned, and if it was that would be a shame.

So the film isn’t a complete success at what it intends to be, but at the very least is funny. And buying it might just tell Fox that people might want a better edition of the film. What’s not to like?