Monday, January 15, 2007

Movie Review: Idiocracy

You probably didn't hear about this movie when it was in theatres. There was no advertising done and it was only released in 7 markets nationwide. The only reason Fox released it at all is because they owed it to Mike Judge, the creator. He's made them a lot of money. Much the same reason they keep "The Simpsons" going despite the beating they give to Fox.

The story is that the US Army wants to keep it's best soldiers for wartime instead of wasting them in times of peace. So they develop a Top Secret cryogenics program to preserve them. It's tested on one average soldier and one hooker. They're supposed to be stored for a year, but the project head gets mixed up with the hooker's pimp and they both go to jail. The project is forgotten for 500 years until a garbage avalanche uncovers it. Due to bad television, Fox News, and the fact that only morons seem to breed the perfectly average soldier is now the smartest man in the world by a lot. He's given the task of figuring out how to fix the crop failures and dust storms. He's pretty intimidated by the task until he realizes they've replaced water - "like from toilets?" - with a Gatorade type product. But after the switch Gatorade sales drop so the computer lays off half the staff, which is a huge chunk of population. As punishment our hero must face off in the monster truck arena while driving a rice-burner.

It's now out on DVD. I'm glad I bought it.
This is really a great movie, but I'm still not having kids.

1 comment:

Carrie M said...

I can't believe this movie slipped by without a shred of promotion. it looked really funny, and I love Luke Wilson. I'll have to check it out.