Remember absolutely detesting this movie and I couldn't remember why. That it just wasn't funny couldn't quite account for the level of vitriol I felt towards it.
Then 14:40 or so in and I get reminded why. Oh yeah. That.
Edit: Got to the debate. Still hate the film. That though was highly amusing
I think the Marxist propaganda puppet won that argument to be honest.
Not that either he or the robot have the right answer, but leaning left here. Tim seems to be more describing the problem rather than analysing the underlying reasons
Poor Chuck, he was finally defeated by a film. A film about stupid. I guess stupid will always beat genius
I think the big problem with this film is not that people take it seriously, it's that people take it too literal. "Hurr, hurr, the president is a dum dum wrestler, he's Trump", "Hurr durr Westerners don't have babies anymore unlike the inbred fucks, hurr hurr", "Hurr hurr, corporates have the Congress in their pockets, like they do now", "Hurr durr the film predicted Youtube with the Ouch my Balls clearly being Jake Paul, and the whole video is surrounded by ads like Youtube", etc. So basically people act like the characters from the film, in a way. It's easy to fall for the bait, and I have to admit I too make jokes of "Idiocracy happened 490 years too early". But if you take it too literal, you gloss over the theme of the film: humanity regressed because we haven't done anything to stop that from happening.
Rather than consider the film to to a lost quatrain of Nostradamus, it's best to look at it as an Aesop, a fable, like The Scorpion and the Frog (you won't say the story is stupid because scorpions and frogs don't speak the same language therefore they couldn't understand each other, now do you?) or The Ant and the Grasshopper ("grasshoppers don't die during the winter, they hide like all insects in insulated or warm places, the author is stupid so the story is tupid, also the ant is clearly a robber baron, the grasshoppers should all rise up and destroy the anthill and redistribute their wealth to the maggots!"): a flawed metaphor for what happens when you let terrible people in charge of anything (morons and short sighted people being let in important positions like Brawndo taking over the government to eliminate their competition) and not only do nothing to stop it, but waste your resources on other pointless stuff (why solve the decline of world intelligence which given that it seems to be transmitted hereditary would point to some new genetic mutation or maybe some unidentified viral disease, when you can instead pour all those money into curing hair loss and make the new Super-Viagra).
Oddly what I was getting out of the main character was the idea that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Also a reverse Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Where all the bright ideas came from the past instead of the future.
Another thing that I kind of wished Chuck pointed out is the effect of nourishment (or lack of it) has on intelligence. There is one particular clip in the scene where the narrator explains how Brawndo replaced water, in which a mother tries to feed her baby Brawndo instead of, you know, breastfeeding like any other normal human would do. While it's played for laughs, it's quite dark when you come to think about it. Most energy drinks don't release their formula to the public, and sometimes they tend to either add lots of crap in them that they don't disclose or they add too much sugar, caffeine or other stuff in excess. Given that in real life there have been plenty of cases where mentally deranged parents have fed their kids bad food for years and have left them with long-lasting brain damage and not to mention how terrible some school foods can be (UK apparently), there's a serious possibility that one of the main reasons why mankind has become stupid in the film is that something in the food severely affected the human brain. There are many cases where the main source of the "intellectual" problem wasn't found until later, if ever: scurvy was a serious problem for centuries due to lack of fresh food, and while methods for combating it were available at the time, it was only in the early 20th century that the cause for it was officially determined; exposure to lead is now believed, with a high degree of certainty, that it's that it's the main cause for the rise in violent crime, attention deficit and lower IQ (which are technically symptoms of lead poisoning), and after lead was removed from most products, there was a significant reduction in these symptoms in the official statistics, cause which mind you was only determined recently and even so the hypothesis is still not proven fully; back in 2018 a very large study showed a clear link between the effect of the immune system response and various mental diseases, and given that there is still a lot we don't know about the immune system, there is still much to learn here; phenylketonuria is an autosomal recessive genetic condition caused by the body's inability to break down phenylalanine, which causes intellectual disability and microcephally, and while it has existed for centuries, it was only identified in 1934 with its link to nutrition was only established in 1953, meaning that at the time I'm writing this, there are still people alive that were born before these discoveries, so it wasn't that long ago.
I left the phenylketonuria at the end since I feel it's similar to what happens in the film, namely a certain group of people overbreed (and probably inbreed), and given that the phenylketonuria is autosomal recessive, meaning both parents must have it for their kids to display it, I get the feeling that some genetic mutation or some exposure to a new chemical caused a new kind of genetic disorder that caused people to become dumber but hornier, and this trait was slowly passed to everyone, especially given that the birth rate was dropping (so it's less about intelligent people dying off and more of dumb mutants taking over the world), and with everyone inbreeding like morons, more and more idiots appeared and no one saw this as a problem (some probably even thought it might be a solution to the low birthrate) at least at first, but then as idiots became involved more and more in leadership positions, automation eliminated most jobs, and food quality dropped, the problem escalated, and by the time someone finally woke up, it was too late to change anything.
I remember there were jokes about Idiocracy early on when Trump had been elected. One of the ironies was he wanted to make the CEO of Carl's Jr. the Secretary of Labor. However, then the 2017 Atlantic Hurricane Season happened. And it stopped being a joke.
