I did The Social Network for this feature two weeks ago, and since that’s a movie I liked a lot and still do I decided this time to do a movie I was a bit underwhelmed by: Idiocracy. I saw it a few years after it was released and thought it had its moments but was no Office Space. I thought it’d be good to revisit because of how much the concept behind the movie has been invoked in the years since then.

I’ll get to what the movie represents later, but I’ll start by talking about the movie itself. Watching it just over 15 years after I last watched it I still thought the movie was decent to good, but no satirical masterpiece. Here’s some things I liked about it:

• The narrator, voiced by the appropriately named Earl Mann, also known for his voice work for NFL films. I liked the gravitas and deadpan humor he brought to the movie. Also, one of my favorite scenes was the part at the beginning with the high-IQ couple getting increasingly frustrated with not having children.
• The main character, Joe. I thought Luke Wilson made a good everyman, and I thought the writers did a good job of making him just smart enough without being too smart. Another of my favorite scenes was when he missed the shuttle because he was overthinking the time travel idea.
• The logos. I’m a fan of logos so I enjoyed all the different ones they made up for the film. One part I really liked was the morning zoo-style soundboard in the hospital entrance consisting of nothing but pictographs.

Now to the negative stuff. Nothing against Maya Rudolph, but I thought her character didn’t really add anything to the film and the pimp subplot felt tacked on. I’d say my biggest problem with the film, though, was just that I thought it could’ve been a lot better. The idea of a future where everyone’s stupid has a lot of comedic potential, but to me it felt like a lot of the movie was a lazy collection of references to stereotypically dumb things like fast food and monster trucks. Sure, it’s a pretty broad comedy so you could argue it shouldn’t be held to that kind of standard, but I don’t think it’s the satirical masterpiece some people act like it is.

Now we get to the real world significance of the movie. Some argue that the movie is pro-eugenics, but I think it was probably unintentional on the filmmakers’ part, sorta like how The Incredibles was accidentally pro-Objectivist. You could argue the movie has a more cogent point when it comes to the idea that our culture has come to glorify anti-intellectualism, but even then I think that’s more cyclical than anything. The 2000s had a lot of dumb entertainment, with reality TV being at its peak, but then the so-called Golden Age of TV really reached its peak in the 2010s as a medium that had long been considered dumb finally got widely praised for being smart. Unfortunately, the Zaslavification of TV has caused a dip in quality in the 2020s, so hopefully things will eventually improve again.

Trump is the biggest thing people point to in support of the idea that society is dumbing down, but even then I think it’s just cyclical. Just look at the 19 years since the film’s release for evidence. Dubya won the last two elections before the movie, but the next two were won by Obama. Trump’s 2016 win was a big setback, but we did kick him out in 2020 and, while I wouldn’t call Biden an intellectual, that year did make a star out of Anthony Fauci, who managed to win the country over just by being a smart, reasonable, competent guy. Unfortunately we just repeated the same mistake we made in 2016, so here’s hoping the pendulum swings back the other way in 2028.

Also, not to promote anti-intellectualism or anything, but it seems to me that a big part of the problem we’re in is that a lot of high-profile smart people turned out to be not nearly as moral as they are smart and not nearly as smart outside their area of expertise as in it. It’s appropriate that Mike Judge co-created Silicon Valley, a show that repeatedly showed that even geniuses can find themselves out of their depth morally and intellectually.

I think the word “prescient” gets overused when referring to works of fiction. One problem is that a lot of “prescient” works of fiction were really just observing societal trends that have been around for a long time, so I don’t think predicting those things will continue to exist counts as prescient. There’s always been plenty of stupidity in society. When was there an intellectual golden age that we’ve somehow lost?

Few more things:

• I’d never heard of Fuddruckers when I saw the movie, so the joke of it turning into Buttfuckers fell flat to me since I thought Fuddruckers was a pretty goofy name to begin with.
• It’s weird to see Terry Crews credited as Terry Alan Crews.
• Watching that Fox News scene it’s weird to think there are now multiple networks for people who think Fox News isn’t extreme enough.
• To end on a note of praise I’ll say that the joke about Brawndo buying government agencies feels particularly relevant right now.