By Steve Biodrowski

Although released in 2006, this film sports a 2005 copyright, indicating that it had been sitting on the shelf for nearly a year, until its distributor could unceremoniously dump it. There is an "additional editing" credit at the end, which suggests that extra editing took place to try to fix the film in post-production. The movie also has a voice-over narration that explains much of the story, which further suggests that the running time was shortened to speed up the pace, and the narration added to fill in the gaps.

All of this may lead you to expect that IDIOCRACY, which is about a guy who ends up five hundred years in the future after a hibernation experiment goes wrong, would turn out to be an overdone turkey, but it is actually quite funny. The basic premise is that smart people are thinking long and hard about the responsibilities of parenthood and, consequently, are having fewer children, while stupid people are procreating like mad, which leads to a future world in which everyone operates at the intellectual level of Beavis and Butt-Head.

Luke Wilson stars as the ordinary guy who wakes up in this dead-head future, where his modest intelligence makes him seem like a genius. The problem is that these morons dismiss his relatively fancy talk is "faggy" because it exceeds their intellectual capacity.

The premise is a tiny bit like Woody Allen's SLEEPER (e.g., a guy coming out of hibernation in the future), but the vision of the future is quite different. Instead of some version of an Orwellian fascist state, this is one where things only barely continue to operate because most of the machinery is automated to the point that the humans don't have to do - or more importantly, think - very much to operate it.

The look of the production suggests a low-budget post-apocalyptic exploitation film, circa 1970s, wherein they had little money to create a believable future, so they tried to conceive it on the cheap, relying on back lots and cheap-looking props to suggest a run-down world. The difference is that in the 1970s, the terrain would have included a blasted wasteland in addition to a ruined city, with a handful of static matte paintings to depict crumbling buildings in the background; now we get CGI shots that are more mobile but no more convincing.

Overall, the satire is not quite barbed as it could be. The movie cleverly paints a mocking portrait of the a future that is recognizably built upon the cultural trash we see all around us today - like schlocky television entertainment and air-head news (Fox Channel comes gets a big whack up the side of the head). But the target mostly seems to be trailer trash - it's as if people who love World of Wrestling now run the world.

Unfortunately, taking aim at this target feels a bit like shooting a sitting duck. When Luke Wilson's simple, logical explanations to solve the world's problems fall on deaf, Judge seems to be holding a mirror up to the current political situation, where intelligent candidates and politicians like Al Gore and John Kerry are dismissed as eggheads, while aggressively - and proudly - ignorant ones like George Bush are embraced as being real down-to-earth people. But Judge never drives the point home; he just leaves it dangling there for you to make the connection if you want to. The best satire (like DR. STRANGELOVE) is not so tepid and wary of offending; it should slice like a rapier, unafraid of striking its target.

This timidity makes IDIOCRACY feel a bit more like a juvenile joke - funny but not quite as sharp as it should be. And some of the scenes fall flat (like an extended joke wherein a tight-laced army general expounds on how he befriended a pimp in order to obtain the use of a prostitute for the hibernation experiment). It's as if the concept were good, but Judge didn't quite have the chops as a director to pull it all off - maybe the futuristic stuff was just a bit too much for him? Still, the laugh-quotient is more than enough to make this worthwhile viewing.

TRIVIA

20th Century Fox gave a contractually obligated "stealth" release to IDIOCRACY, the sci-fi comedy from Mike Judge (who made his name with MTV's BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD before writing and directing the excellent corporate comedy OFFICE SPACE). In 2006, the film opened in a handful of theatres in Los Angeles and a few other cities, without benefit of advertising or promotion.

DVD DETAILS

20th Century Fox's initial DVD release of the film (ASIN: B0007VHOG) presented the film in widescreen with English (Dolby Digital 5.1) and Spanish (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround) audio tracks, plus English, Spanish, and French subtitles. (Through some kind of glitch, the DVD also seems to offer a fourth subtitle option, also listed as Spanish on screen, but no subtitles appear when this option is selected.)

The amusing DVD menu recreates the look of a television screen shown in the film: several garish advertisements flash around the periphery of the screen while a clip of "Oww my Balls!" plays in the center. Unfortunately, the confusing jumble of images makes it difficult to navigate the menu options, which consist of Play, Scene Selection (with 20 chapter stops), Language Selection, and Special Features (some of the words are deliberately misspelled, suggesting the stupidity of the film's future world).

The Special Features consist of five deleted scenes, none of them significant. The first consist of a bit more footage from the baby-making montage near the film's beginning (which depicts stupid people out-breeding intelligent people, leading to the dumbing down of the world's I.Q.). The next two are depict the Joe's girlfriend (who is not seen in the final cut) as she gives up waiting on him after he disappears for a year as part of the army hibernation experiment. The fourth features Maya Rudolph who has trouble finding the "Museum of Art" in the future (run the last two words together and you'll get the joke). And the last scene is actually a longer version of a sequence in the film, with Joe looking out a White House window.

None of the footage significantly impacts the film, nor do the missing scenes suggest any major re-editing of the film (which one might have expected, considering its long-delayed release and its multiple editors in listed in the credits). Unfortunately, there are no other bonus features, in particular no behind-the-scenes featurettes that explain Fox's handling of the theatrical release, dumping the film with no promotional effort whatsoever.