I’ll admit that, like many of the great unwashed of 2006, I completely missed Idiocracy the first time it came around. And with a gross of under $500k during the film’s entire run in theaters, it's also pretty clear that only the savvy few cared enough to watch it when it was around. We really should commend these 'savvy few', whoever they are, because they're always the ones who wind up seeing the movies that end up being cult classics further down the line. That is at least if they're not busy patting themselves on the back for knowing that in the first place. In any case Idiocracy, as cult a classic as they can get, is Mike Judge’s (Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, Office Space) vision of an American future that is as disheartening as it is dumb and, its fans will tell you, is growing more prophetic by the day. Its telling of the fate of a nation that what has culturally straddled both the line between sophistication and anti-intellectualism since the early 20th century - and now has to reap the rewards of such a dangerous position - isn't pretty for anyone hoping the years to come would usher in a utopia. But for those online commentators who don't believe in such naivety? Boy, do they love this movie.

Its status in this crazy, bizarre year of 2016 is also noteworthy. This year marks the 10th anniversary of Idiocracy’s first theatrical release - an advent that in so many other parallel universes, probably still doesn’t matter. But because fate has decreed that we don't deserve a happy timeline, we live in age of the most bizarre US election in history. Trump versus Hilary. Clinton versus The Donald. Pariah versus pariah. It doesn’t matter what you call it, this particular race for the White House - thanks not only to the runners but also the people supporting them - is the most unbearably retarded dirt-slinging match in modern political history. In terms of how it's reflected on the nation as a whole, many of its observers have blamed both media and society itself, who in their view have collectively come to favour the vigorous dumbing-down of topical discourse. Add the ongoing furore to the uncanny ability of film buffs to find forgotten movies, hype them to the moon and boom! All of a sudden, Idiocracy is now an underappreciated stroke of genius in the right place at the right time.

Actual viewing reveals that it doesn’t quite deserve such a glowing contemporary reputation. Nonetheless, it’s incredibly easy to see how it could have gotten one. Mike Judge is a creator who is absolutely worthy of the acclaim awarded to his works. His frequent stabs at satirizing contemporary America have more often than not been on the money when it comes to depicting the morons that dominate our society and the ones who have to suffer them. Thus on first glance, Idiocracy is just the kind of idea you’d expect from a mind that has always been well-connected to the pulse of the U.S social landscape.

It’s also an idea that pitches a terrifying scenario. Just what would happen if the intellectuals of US society simply stopped breeding to the point that they were overtaken by the dumb ones at a rate so alarming that it triggered an unstoppable cultural apocalypse for the human race? Despite what some of the movie’s most fervent evangelists insist will come, it’s not a reality we'll have to deal with. But it is one that the film’s protagonist, U.S military officer Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), is flung headlong into.

A soldier so utterly average that he manages to occupy the exact middle of every curve that military report graphs can project, Joe is earmarked for a top-secret science program that involves the testing of a new, ultra-high tech sleep chamber. And it is indeed his incredible mediocrity that is one of the big reasons for his selection. Simply put, he’s so undistinguished that nobody will kick up a fuss about him if he ‘disappears’ as a result of the experiment going wrong. He’s joined by another participant: Rita (Maya Rudolph), a prostitute on the run from her pimp, who is deemed just as disposable to society with the difference that she actually has a good reason to go hiding for a while. With the program initiated and the pair put into isolated hibernation, everything looks set for them to be woken up within one year when the experiment concludes - if not for the fact that the army lieutenant in charge of the project gets himself arrested for running his own prostitution ring (which he only started to recruit someone like Rita), leaving the project to run amok.

Without an overseer (and in a perfect example of American military bureaucracy exacting itself), the project goes from classified to immediately forgotten about: even the very laboratory it’s still running in ends up getting a Fuddrucker’s built over it. Even through all this time, Joe and Rita still lay dormant inside their capsules - a slumber that ends up lasting 500 years when Joe is eventually and unceremoniously woken up by his chamber getting unearthed in a massive garbage avalanche, flinging it into the house of one of America’s future citizens. The answer to why exactly there’s been a garbage avalanche though isn’t pretty - and neither is discovering the kind of individual who makes up the U.S citizenry in 2505.

In the centuries that have followed, American society has spiralled into abject, slobbish stupidity. The very reason for this is the shift in the breeding rate of the nation’s supposed jocks, rednecks and other numbskulls over the smart, 'decent' folks who decided their lives weren’t worth the bother of kids. Apply this shift to a five-century period and you have an America that has descended into the neo-neanderthal age - a modern-day Flintstones’ Bedrock without the comedic charm. A place where the biggest show on television is a Jackass-inspired tale of high art called Ow! My Balls!, and a wasteland where garbage mountains line the horizon because people have become too lazy and too mentally challenged to deal with them.

Joe soon realizes the full horror of the situation he’s woken up to when it dawns on him that, even with his inimitable averageness, he is a man of intelligence that transcends everyone around him - and having even a semblance of smarts is enough to make you a hated outcast. The only goal for Joe, and eventually Rita (who’s also woken up and discovered she can easily make a fortune in this world through just how gullible the male mouthbreathers around her have become) is to get back to 2005 whichever way they can.

It’s a hunt for a simple resolution that the film does a good job of dragging out over its 80+ minute run without it ever feeling too dull - mostly thanks to the film’s early setup being so amusing, and for the majority of the cast genuinely enjoying the increasingly ludicrous situations they’re given. For the cynic in all of us, it also feels incredibly apt. It’s very easy to believe that if the country’s low-lives truly did run the asylum that billboard advertisements would be punctuated by expletives and threatening language and that Carl’s Jr. would operate on the side as a welfare board - allowing you to get benefits as well as ‘extra big-ass fries’ with your burger. Like any good anti-intellectual satire, Idiocracy makes great of its early going simply by painting its aftermath of the dumbass revolution in such vividly brown colours that anyone truly fearful of it happening can both laugh, and sadly nod at how good a take it is.

It’s also a ‘what if’ scenario that is ripe for some serious exploration into the context of what makes human society what it is. How did our culture become so splintered and individualistic that the 'smart' and the 'dumb' live such different lives and hate each other? It was just one potential scenario that I was hoping might have some commentary in the film's second half, but that just didn't materalize. Instead, Idiocracy curiously and fiercely puts the brakes on any further satirical dissection. The jokes about idiots being idiots begin to repeat themselves and the writing just doesn’t quite hit the same mark. It becomes apparent that the film slowly becomes confined by its main pitch - choosing to stay as one long punchline about how dumb the American underclass are, rather than a multi-layered critique of how they’ve emerged in the first place.

Oddly this dip in quality coincides with the on-screen arrival of Terry Crews’ character, U.S President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, who is easily the best thing about the whole movie and a major factor in keeping it from descending into complete sterility. Crews’ own enthusiasm marries nicely with the larger-than-life role he’s given, a hilarious TV-evangelist-by-way-of-professional-wrestler-and-head-of-state caricature, and his State of the Union address in particular to a Congress whooping and cheering as if they were actually at an Evangelical church sermon is definitely a highlight. It’s a godsend too. By the time of his appearance, Idiocracy’s comedy is threatening to go so far south that it almost feels as shallow and dumb as the people it’s attempting to parody.

Crews isn’t alone in putting in a shift here, either. Special mention must also be given to Dax Shepard as Frito, the idiot attorney who not only serves as the guy whose house gets half-demolished by Joe’s sudden re-emergence into the world, but also as the main lens through which the viewer gets to see just how stupid America’s people have become. Shepard definitely gets to enjoy most of the film's best lines, and transcends all levels of hilarious simpletonry with his delivery of them. The script also gives Maya Rudolph’s Rita a chance to sassily shine with some great wisecracks too, and Luke Wilson as the perfectly boring, perfectly affable Joe also offers the movie the equally perfect straight guy from which to play its farce off of. When the writing starts to hit the wall, it is the total sum of these performances - and nothing less would have done - that get Idiocracy over the line when its plot begins to tire.

What also tires - and troubles - with Idiocracy is that there is a fairly insidious message underneath all of its mockery and caricaturing when it comes to America’s class divide. Its black-and-white reasoning of ‘intelligent’ and ‘dumb’ is the kind of dirty, false smearing that the self-perceived bright thinkers of the left have unfortunately been labelling the American lower classes with for years. Jokes about how only stupid people go to burger joints, monster truck rallies and drink Gatorade are all well and good when you just want to crack a gag or two. But when you’re combining such reasoning with the film’s premise of the lower classes out-breeding the higher ones because they’re too ‘stupid’ to do anything but have kids, you start to make very unsubtle suggestions about poverty and privilege: suggestions that don’t really seem particularly intelligent themselves.

Idiocracy's fans will point to the rise of Donald Trump as potential President as justification for their film’s new-found reputation as a supposedly accurate prediction of the forthcoming age of dumb. It isn’t, mostly because America isn’t growing dumber - it’s just suffering from the side-effect of an Internet that has hyper-connected everyone to the views they never would have been exposed to in the pre-Web age. Trump definitely does command a following of whom numerous individuals are expressing opinions that should have stayed in that era, there is no question of that. But the defining factor behind his popularity isn’t stupidity - it’s a far more complex combination of economic decline in certain regions of the States with the growing dissatisfaction that disenfranchised poor whites have with the American political system. And history has already taught us several times how easily manipulated the under-privileged can be when put under such pressure-cooker factors.

But as a film, Idiocracy does at least deserve some of the renown it has gained among viewers and critics. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a fairly dated satire that, while occasionally hilarious and effective, is entirely dependent on one single idea that isn’t funny enough, nor ever gets developed enough, to justify a whole feature-length movie. But the left (of which I consider myself a part of) can be as prone to snap judgments just like the right can. Most viewers will be too busy laughing at Idiocracy’s goofball humour to notice that such reactionism underpins the laughs to be had here. They’ll amuse themselves at the billboard ads yelling ‘Fuck you!’, and give a wry sigh at just how much of a reflection it is on the U.S’ present-day ‘dumbed down’ media. They’ll also overlook the fact that that the very same media content is being delivered by iPhone-fawning, viral-content obsessed millenials like themselves (and me). It’s an inconvenient hypocrisy that’s been lost under all of the recent hype that the film has received, but the legacy that’s being demanded for Idiocracy is only partially about celebrating art that captures society. It’s also about giving us liberal smart-asses another reason to laugh at the poor.