Movie review: Idiocracy (2006)
Been a long time since I watched a movie. This one had been on my docket for a long time and I finally mustered the energy to go through.
To make it simple, it was fun. Sure, I wasn't expecting a very subtle comedy, but that doesn't really matter. What does is "serious unseriousness", i.e. effort. Main reason I like British humour: they know that you mustn't half-ass things, even silly comedies.
And it managed that, I felt some real effort, especially in the visuals. Now, it sure isn't a
masterpiece and I'm not going to say He just like me fr fr!
or anything, but you've got
to admit that some stuff rings true.
Now for the inevitable two paragraphs comparing it with Brave New World
and reality
(can you even review a dystopia and not have it turn into a rant?):
- Everybody praises Huxley's masterpiece much more, but not always for the right reasons. Sure, its age (from 1932) makes its prophetic aspect very impressive, and it is way more thought-out than "low-brow" American comedy, but not more accurate. At least not that much, a few decades of hindsight clearly helped this, Demolition Man and Judge Dredd envision how bad the 21th century would get.
- I'm sure most people laughed at Idiocracy while imagining themselves in the hero's
shoes, miles away from the funny morons. I'll be the pretentious fart sniffer you expect me to be
and say it: they're wrong. I say that the state of decay is what's truly different but the
people? They're fundamentally already driven by pleasure and passive consuming. Their free time
is filled with too much socialization, Netflix/TV/MCU slop, traveling, pets, ego-boosting crap like
meditation/self-help fads, etc… no purpose, no creation,
barbecues and ball games.
tl;dr fun movie, a bit too heavy-handed and plot is lacking; shit's already going down and people don't see that they're not so far from some of these parodies.
I'll let this politician close for me, seems like he can talk a great deal of sense:
