Idiocracy
Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson) is average. Absolutely average. Solidly average. Peak of the bell curve in every measure. The army wants to be able to freeze its top performers and thaw them when needed. What better than to experiment on someone so average he wouldn’t be missed. So Joe is to be frozen for one year. He wakes up 500 years later.
The US in the year 2505 is a quite different place. As educated, above average people are having fewer kids later in life, Jerry Springer rejects just pop them out as fast as possible. The end result is that the average intelligence of the American populace has moved the peak of the bell curve several feet to the left, and Joe is now the smartest man in the country.
A very good movie by Mike Judge (Office Space, King of the Hill, Beavis and Butthead). The premise is great, the storytelling is good, the acting is good. It only suffers in the way it’s delivered. The narrator gives a back story, character one does a setup, character two delivers the punch line. Story - setup - punchline. Story - setup - punchline. I mean, they’re good stories, setups and punchlines, but they could have mixed it up a bit.
The scary thing about this movie (as it was with Office Space) is the way this vision of the future seems so plausible. Advertising is so pervasive, people wear it. The Secretary of State is brought to you by Carl’s, Jr. Advertising tag lines are repeated as justification of the products use. (Crops are watered with “Brawndo”, a Gatoraide type product, because ‘it has electrolytes’.)
April 12th, 2007 at 5:06 am
One of my all time favorite movies………