Retrospective Film Review

Idiocracy (2006) • 15 Years Later

An average guy is selected as a guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program… only to be forgotten about, awakening to a moronic future…

What was once a broad science-fiction comedy, Mike Judge’s Idiocracy seems less preposterous with each passing year. It posits a future where idiots have produced more offspring than intellectuals for centuries, resulting in an infantilised world of low-IQ folk who’ve inherited a decaying, nonsensical world as a result. In 2006, this seemed like a highly amusing idea; in 2020, the President of the United States suggested people inject themselves with bleach in a fight against a pandemic.

20th Century Fox effectively abandoned Idiocracy, after delaying its original 2005 release for a year, then only making it available theatrically in seven cities with zero marketing or promotion. Terry Crews gave an interview to GQ Magazine in 2018 that suggested companies that agreed to be featured in the movie weren’t happy with how they were portrayed (e.g. Starbucks also provides hand-jobs in the future). Did…