Idiocracy

To top off the Memorial Day weekend, we tried to get the kids to bed early Monday night and settled down for a nice evening of watching a movie we'd had on the DVR for months: Idiocracy.

We heard about it and thought it would be funny, and although it was funny in certain ways, it was still lacking in others. The gist of the movie is that the army freezes an "average Joe" for supposedly one year, but it ends up being 500 years. Society has, by that point, degraded into stupidity-fueled, violence-ladened reality TV - as in, pretty much everything is reality TV - and everyone is now super-stupid. (And, of course, the world is covered in trash.) The "average Joe" is now the smartest person in the world and he has to save the world from itself.

So, the funny and rather sad part is that I could totally see the US going down this path! But, the movie itself just wasn't very good. My husband actually fell asleep about 30 minutes before the end. When he woke up, he asked me what happened and I was able to summarize what happened in the end in one sentence, [**spoiler alert**] "They send Joe to Rehabilitation, a reality-TV show where all contestants get killed, but just before he gets killed, they realize the plants are growing, so they save him and he ends up becoming President." I just looked it up on Wikipedia and apparently it has "achieved a cult following". Egads. Another example of why I can see the US ending up like this.

Now, if you really want to see a great post-apocalyptic movie, I highly recommend WALL-E. The downfall of society is just so much cuter and easier to watch! And the hero of the movie is a loyal, hard-working, lovable robot. What's not to love about that?