Idiocracy (R)
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Warning: ableist language.

This movie came out in 2006, but I didn't see it until 2024. Long before I watched it, I had it listed among my "dystopian films I want to see", but I had forgotten about that, and right before I started watching it, I assumed I'd either put my review under "comedy" or "meh". But while watching it, I decided to categorize it as "psychological horror". It does have elements of comedy, dystopia, and science fiction, but I really think horror is the best fit. Not like a typical psychological horror film, of course, because the film is trying to be funny (though most of the time I didn't feel like it succeeded particularly well). But the dystopian society in which most of the story takes place scares the hell out of me in various ways, both for all that the main character goes through, and for the fate of humanity. And looking around at the current state of society, it's frighteningly easy to believe something like the society depicted as 500 years in the future could actually come about, and probably a lot sooner than half a millennium from now. Anyway... I haven't rated the movie, because I don't think I liked it very much, on a surface level. But on a deeper level, it's kind of... smarter than it seems on the surface. I guess. It's really hard for me to look past the surface idiocy, though.

So, it begins in the present, with a scientific experiment conducted by the U.S Army, in which a soldier/librarian who doesn't like to do anything and is like the most average person in the world, named Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), is put into suspended animation for one year. The officer in charge of the experiment also chooses a prostitute named Rita (Maya Rudolph) to be put into suspended animation. Unfortunately, shortly after the experiment begins, the officer is caught up in a scandal and his Army base is shut down and bulldozed. The movie's narrator explains how society dumbed down over the next 500 years, and Joe awakens in the year 2505. Rita awakens a bit later. Because of an accident involving mountains of garbage, Joe's hibernation pod crashes into the home of a lawyer named Frito (Dax Shepard), who immediately throws him out. Joe spends some time wandering around trying to figure out what the hell is going on, and eventually learns how much time has passed, and how stupid everyone is in the future. He ends up in jail, where he's given an I.Q. test. (He's also given the name "Not Sure", for a reason I won't even try to explain.) He soon escapes, but is eventually recaptured and brought to the President of America, Dwayne Camacho (Terry Crews), who appoints him Secretary of the Interior because his I.Q. test showed him to be the smartest person in the world. And Joe is tasked with solving the world's problems, starting with the fact that crops are dying. (This is the one thing I really knew about the movie before I watched it.) He also reconnects with Rita, and gets help from Frito, who he hopes will be able to take Rita and him to a time machine, to return to their own time.

Well, I'm leaving out countless details of the plot, and I'm not going to spoil how it all ends. But while I'd understand if some people found the movie too dumb to watch all the way through, I can also understand how some people liked it a lot more than I did. At least I found myself invested in finding out what would happen to Joe and Rita, so it was somewhat interesting to see events play out. And again, there was the deeper social commentary to appreciate. And the horror of it all. So I'm glad to have finally seen it. Oh, and there's a fun little post-credits scene.