Script Review - "Idiocracy" (formerly 3001) by Mike Judge & Etan Cohen

Writing a good dorm room comedy is a lot harder than it seems. Think of Animal House, Old School, Super Troopers, Stripes, movies that succeed due to their take-no-prisoners comedic timing and ridiculously quotable dialogue, movies that thrive on repeat viewings with large groups of your slightly inebriated friends. It's a genre that has to appeal to our basest animal desires (man hit in crotch = funny) while, at the same time, showing enough of a clever and subversive spark to interest a first-year college student who's read most of The Sound and The Fury. You can't simply pit slobs against snobs and expect to find box office gold. There's an art to genuinely funny dorm room humor and it's a skill that Mike Judge knows well.

Aside from creating Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, Mike Judge is probably best known as the writer-director of the cult hit Office Space, a film that mixes a beautifully base sense of humor ("Hey Peter, man, check out channel 9, it's the breast exams!") with a cutting satirical look at the absurdity of white-collar corporate America. Though Office Space tanked at theaters, it developed a massive fan base through VHS, DVD, and a near-infinite number of basic cable broadcasts.

Judge recently completed filming his second feature (originally titled 3001, but changed to Idiocracy due to some copyright issues with 2001: A Space Odyssey author Arthur C. Clarke) and, after reading the August 8, 2003 draft of the script, I can tell you that your annoying friend who's been screaming "You're my boy, Blue!" for months on end will finally have a new source of material. Idiocracy is funny. Really, really damn funny. And if Mike Judge can make me laugh half as much in the theater as I did while reading this script, then it will have a very healthy Blockbuster shelf life.

Written by Judge and Etan Cohen, Idiocracy is based on a simple premise, previously used with great comedic success by Woody Allen's Sleeper and Matt Groening's Futurama, a man from our time is frozen and reawakened in the future. However, while Sleeper and Futurama spoofed the conventions of science fiction films, Judge takes a different route, offering biting commentary on the current direction of modern popular culture.

The plot follows Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson), an Army electrician who revels in being average and only wants to fade into the background until he can finally start drawing his government pension. Against his will, Joe is drafted into a military hibernation program that will place him in cryogenic sleep for a year. Because no female soldiers were average or expendable enough for the project, the Army hires a prostitute, Rita (Maya Rudolph), to act as Joe's counterpart. One of the script's most potent recurring jokes is Joe's steadfast inability to realize what Rita does for a living. (Thinking Rita is an artist, when Joe asks her what she paints, Rita answers, "I don't know, people, fruit, and shit.")

Joe and Rita are placed into hibernation pods and the project commences. However, thanks to a bureaucratic snafu, the program is cancelled by the Army and quickly forgotten. Eventually, the hibernation pods are hauled off to a landfill, with Joe and Rita still sleeping inside. They sleep for almost a thousand years until their pods are accidentally rediscovered in the year 2974. And it's Mike Judge's singular vision of the future that will hopefully ensure Idiocracy a place within the pantheon of classic dorm room comedies and about eight thousand Comedy Central airings per year.

In the script's opening pages, we listen to a narrator discussing the evolution of mankind throughout the twentieth century. He tells us that "while most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent...all signs indicated that the human race was heading in the opposite direction - a dumbing down." This segues into a hilarious split screen montage where, on one side, we see a yuppie couple who keep putting off having children because of their careers, the stock market, and so on, and on the other side we see a white trash couple who keep having children because they "ain't got no rubbers." As the yuppies get older and infertile, the white trash side overflows with dirty, mulleted babies. The narrator reminds us "Evolution does not necessarily reward that which is good or beautiful. It simply rewards those who reproduce the most." Mike Judge's future is not the brave new world of Asimov or Clarke. It's a moronic Jerry Springer hell where the lowest common denominator has become the status quo.

When Joe awakens in the future, he discovers an America covered with mountains of landfill garbage and advertisements on every possible surface. It's a world where people can live their entire lives within the walls of Walmart and where the U.S. government is a subsidiary of "AOL-Time-Warner-Starbucks." People eat a goo-like substance out of a jar labelled "Food" and the two most popular television networks are the Violence and Masturbation Channels. (Possibly my favorite joke in the entire script is watching how the name of the restaurant Fuddruckers has evolved throughout time into its eventual lowbrow zenith, Buttf***ers.)

A garbage landslide unearths Joe's pod, which crashes into the apartment of Dizz (Dax Shepard), a grunting slovenly futuristic everyman, who rarely leaves his La-Z-Boy with its built-in toilet. Because language has deteriorated throughout the centuries, when Joe speaks, Dizz can barely understand him (imagine a man from the 1500s trying to speak Elizabethan English in modern-day Amarillo, Texas). Scared by Dizz's hostile grunts and disoriented from his hibernation, Joe stumbles across the hellish garbage-covered city to a hospital, still somehow convinced that he's just hallucinating.

The hospital sequence is one of the funniest parts of Idiocracy, gleefully showing how complex bureaucracies can develop even in the dumbest of societies. Joe finds that hospitals are now set up like Jiffy Lubes - you stand in line until a technician hooks you into a machine that loudly offers a pre-recorded diagnosis ("You've got hepatitis!"). When Joe finally gets to see a doctor (who offers the diagnosis "your shit may be retarded"), he begins to realize what's happened. His panic is interrupted when the doctor notices that Joe is "unscannable" - everyone in the future has a UPC tattoo on their hands - and sets off an alarm calling the authorities. Joe flees the hospital, confused but determined to find Rita, the only person he knows that might still be alive.

Rita's pod was unearthed in the same landslide, but when Joe finds her, it's clear that she's been handling the future-shock much better than he has. (Apparently, it's a lot easier to be a prostitute when the male population is even dumber.) When the government authorities finally apprehend Joe and Rita, President Camacho - a professional wrestler who wears a special "president" costume - gives Joe a startling piece of information. Even though Joe was considered painfully average in his own time, in the future, he is the smartest man on the planet and the world needs him to solve their most pressing problems. If Joe can't help, he'll be sent to the ominous-sounding "Rehabilitation." But if he can, he'll become the Secretary of the Interior and have a chance to find a rumored government time machine that could take him back to his own time.

Possibly the most impressive aspect of Idiocracy is the screenplay's level of detail. Judge and Cohen have created a fully realized world out of their worst fears for the future of mankind. They know exactly how people talk in their future, what they eat, where they work. Portions of the screenplay read almost like a TV pilot because the writers do such a fantastic job of setting up their characters and environments.

However, because Mike Judge the writer paints such a skilled and specific portrait of the future in the script, it makes me a little nervous for Mike Judge the director. There is a wealth of texture and depth written into the Idiocracy screenplay and Judge the director is going to have to visually translate all of that onto the big screen. It's not an easy job. Also, the script's third act depends heavily on an extended action sequence, which have the tendency to fall flat in low-budget comedies. And although Office Space has become a modern classic, in actuality, the movie completely falls apart in the final act, foregoing laughs for a lame corporate embezzlement subplot. The ending of Office Space just never seemed to fit with the rest of the film and that's my one main worry about Idiocracy. Funny slam-bang action is great, but not at the expense of the story.

My only other concern is about Maya Rudolph's Rita, a character that, at times, is drawn a bit too broad. Though having a lone hooker in a land of morons is undeniably hilarious, there are scenes where Rita reads more like a caricature than a character. However, Rita does exhibit a few emotionally honest moments with Joe and Maya Rudolph is such an amazing comedic actor that I'm confident that the character is in good hands.

You really have to admire Judge for throwing away Gene Roddenberry's condescending futuristic utopias in favor for a more-realistic future based on our current society's almost insatiable appetite for Paris Hilton and Donald Trump. This is a vision of tomorrow that's both familiar and shameful. While it's funny to read about a professional wrestler preening about in his president costume, one only has to think about Arnold Schwarzenegger's political aspirations, and Idiocracy takes on a new, much scarier dimension.

Overall, Idiocracy is a fantastic comedy script that mixes the exaggerated lowbrow worst of the modern world with a cunning self-awareness that lets us laugh at our present and future selves. Dorm room humor at its best.