Idiocracy (2006)

Synopsis: A man and a woman are cryogenically frozen as part of an army experiment; they are due to be unfrozen in a year, but the project is cancelled and they are forgotten. They finally get unfrozen after 500 years. The world has become populated exclusively by idiots, due to the reproduction rate being negatively correlated to intelligence.

Appraisal: A vast array of excellent comic actors and actresses is this film's forte. The screenplay packs some interesting observations about the current state of affairs in some countries of the world, the U.S. obviously included. After some 30 or 40 minutes of film, maybe less, it has said everything it had to say, the remainder of it being just padding and repetition. The notion that the whole world has devolved in this manner is not really tenable; I think the problems depicted here are mostly U.S.-specific; after the Roman fall, a period of barbarism ensued, but the U.S. is not an empire of such widespread hegemony. Anyway, the film has more serious problems, one of them being lack of reference: since it doesn't have a single intelligent character, any stupidity that is said may be credited to that fact, rather than to its screenwriters' own shortcomings. Just to give an example, when the main character advises people to "read books" and other preventive actions, he is contradicting the film's basic premise that states that the problem is genetic, not educational; as I said, one can easily claim that this is due to that character's lack of intelligence, instead of the film's.

Rating: 47