"Idiocracy"

"Idiocracy" reviewed by Ilkka Kokkarinen of 16 Volts: The long-awaited satire by Mike Judge, creator of "Office Space," "King of the Hill" and "Beavis and Butt-Head" is being dumped by Fox with no advertising or publicity whatsoever in LA, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and Toronto, where the man with all those "Ks" in his name saw it:

So the premise of this movie is that an average guy is frozen Futurama-style and due to a few mishaps he wakes up in the far future, in which centuries of dysgenic breeding has had such severe results that he finds himself the smartest man in the world, so that his habit of using complete sentences makes him sound smart and "faggy". The movie immediately starts great by showing us a smart yuppie couple and the trailer trash couple... Whereas the yuppie couple, who were basically taken straight out of the writings of Steve Sailer or Vox Day, remains childless ("We just can't have a child in this market", the woman says echoing Steve's notion of "affordable family formation", and many other of his themes could be seen in this movie, including the military's reliance on standardized tests), the white trash couple merrily breeds back and forth and soon their ever-expanding family tree completely overcrowds the screen, whereas the yuppie female finds that her fertility has fallen, her husband dies and in the end, now considerably aged and thus uglier, in a style reminiscent of Maureen Dowd, she wistfully longs for the "right guy" to one day come along...

Normally an advertising and publicity tour would have indeed been in proper order, but even though this movie is nowhere as satirically biting as it very easily could have been, consisting mostly of fart jokes ... even the few worms that escape by creaking open this particular can of worms are so immensely serious that it is simply unimaginable that any studio boss would take the slightest chance of becoming the next Mel Gibson over the idea that society of stupid people is worse than a society of smart people.

At least deep down, leftists know perfectly well that they don't have any real arguments against soccer mom eugenics, and they also know that IQ is strongly correlated to most good things in life. Therefore they have no choice but to hysterically shout down and crucify anybody who even dares to approach this forbidden territory as a "Nazi", instead of engaging them in a honest debate. And at least nobody who wants to have a future career in the movie industry would want that for himself. As fun as it is to be right, it is way more fun to be successful.

For this reason, I can't even begin to imagine Luke Wilson sitting in some talkshow and casually explaining how the premise of the movie is that dysgenic breeding is currently making humanity stupider and that is somehow a bad thing. That right there would be the end of his career. Even if this basic concept is played only for crude fart and sex jokes the way it was done in this movie, pretty soon people might start asking the real serious questions and perhaps even begin to notice and point out certain tomwolfean phenomena that are happening in the real world in front of their eyes, and we certainly can't have that, now can we?

So my prediction is that the movie will fail financially and be taken out of the theaters. So those of my readers who want to see this movie, go see it some time this week while you still can. After that, it will take a long time until it might come out on DVD. However, I predict by that time it will suddenly sell more than Futurama, Family Guy and Office Space combined, having achieved a cult status. I am sure I missed many little jokes in the background, and while we were walking home, my wife said that she really wants to see this movie again on DVD, so that she can pause the show when necessary and read everything. [More]

For example, a computer screen flashes that the hero is wanted for four crimes, but I only had time to read the first count of his indictment: "#1. Being a dick."

My wife's favorite performance was the Latino surfer dude who is the district attorney: think of John Leguizamo playing Keanu Reeves' role in "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" being called upon to make an opening statement.

Here's a detailed review/synopsis of the 2003 draft of the screenplay. And here's another. All the dysgenic logic was in there from the beginning, but the morons at Fox apparently didn't figure out until after Judge had shot the film in 2004 that You Can't Say That.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer