Idiocracy on DVD
Buy it at Amazon


Plot Outline Private Joe Bowers, the definition of "average American", is selected by the Pentagon to be the guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program. Forgotten, he awakes 500 years in the future. He discovers a society so incredibly dumbed-down that he's easily the most intelligent person alive.

When Mike Judge's highly anticipated futuristic satire "Idiocracy" opened and promptly closed in a few cities last fall the blogosphere lit up. Idiocracy" appears on DVD today, and once again Mike Judge, best known for TV shows "Beavis and Butt-head" and "King of the Hill," has gotten the fuzzy end of Fox's lollipop, there is no promotions or advertising announcements. Idiocracy indicts American culture with a combination of scathing humor and barely concealed rage, as Judge projects what the country will look like 500 years from now... I agree with him but I don't think it will take 500 years.

His dystopian vision includes avalanches of trash, a U.S. government that has been purchased for corporate sponsorship by a sports drink, and a citizenry that, through demographic reverse Darwinism, has become congenitally fat, lazy, stupid and violent.

Angrier and far less forgiving than "Office Space," Judge's "Idiocracy" doesn't possess the same cult potential, if only because the current lazy, stupid and violent people see they're distant future a little too clearly. No one likes to have they're faults put in front of them including me. But, at look at any city new paper or just go to MySpace and read a few profiles and you'll what may have inspired the movie.

Some more information about the movie.

"Idiocracy" tells the story of an Army private and major slacker Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson), who in 2005 is drafted to take part in a confidential hibernation program; the Army finds a female counterpart in a prostitute named Rita (Maya Rudolph), and she and Joe are put into individual "pods" before being sedated for a year.

Things go awry, and the two guinea pigs don't wake up for 500 years, by which time the country has become populated by porn-addicted rednecks and Uzi-toting gangstas; the English language has been replaced by a patois of "hillbilly, Valley Girl and inner-city slang." A trashed-out landscape that's part zombie film and part broken-down "Blade Runner," the America of "Idiocracy" has become one vast junk food-entertainment complex, where bread and circuses take the form of super-size burritos and monster truck rallies.

With the help of a dimwit named Frito (Dax Shepard), Joe and Rita try to track down a time machine to return to the 21st century, and on the way, Joe is drafted to serve in the White House. But his picaresque journey through one bleak scenario to the next is a mere hanger for Judge's chief point, which is just how close we are already to his apocalypse of mindless consumption, substance-free politics and anti-intellectualism.