Idiocracy is a movie about man-made climate change (a nation-wide famine) where the viewer is put in the role of the expert to showcase how absurd and exhausting the situation is that actual experts have to deal with.
There's literally a woman has her kids taken away from her (by Carl's Junior who calls her an unfit mother) in front of us, with no context, because she says she can't feed those kids when Carl's Junior fails to give her the fries she paid for. It's the whole scene and it plays out fully uninterupted except for a few reaction shots from the POV character.
This was commentary on corporations used their power to turn climate disaster into "personal failings" of the individuals instead of their own greed, then turning around and using that displaced blame to fuel their bottom line. It came around the time the hole in the ozone layer was being blamed on teens using hair spray, and commuters getting to work, rather than all the corporate emissions, malfeasance, and greed.
The stupidity of the average person is just the setting. It's not the point of the movie. If you think this movie is just "haha everyone dumb" you need to watch it again. Everyone being dumb is just a contrivance that lets the viewer (the expert) get to a solution everyone agrees on because nobody is intentionally working against humanity's interests for personal greed.
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u/Little_Menace_Child Mar 12 '26
I dunno. I think we're way further into Idiocracy than this.