Idiocracy

This movie hit me with a force I was quite unprepared for.  I have little intelligent to say about it at the moment (ironically enough), but I’d like to do my part to get people to see it.

Once in a great while, a movie has a vision so thorough and detailed that it alters the way the world outside the theater looks.  The last time it happened to me was Batman in 1989; after two hours steeped in Tim Burton’s vision of Gotham City, with its corruption and decay and facsist architecture, I couldn’t walk the streets of New York that summer without half-expecting to see the Batwing fly overhead.

It happened again tonight with this movie.  The basic concept (people are loud and stupid) couldn’t be more simple, and yet this movie takes it to such a relentlessly high degree that it becomes difficult to shake off.  Idiocracy is a vision of America so specific, so obvious and yet so unique and so detailed, it was impossible for me to walk out of the theater without hearing people talking in its language, moving to its rhythms and acting according to its principles.

I’m not even sure what to compare it to.  Structurally it reminds me of Sleeper; both movies put a self-described “average guy” into a dystopian future, and neither movie has a well-engineered plot.  But after that I start to run out of points of comparison.  If Clockwork Orange had been conceived of as a comedy, I suppose it might have turned out something like this, but that’s about it.  Suffice to say, it’s not like Beavis and Butt-head and it’s not like King of the Hill and it’s not like Office Space.  In fact I would say it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before, and how many movies can you say that about these days?